PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - J. Chen
AU  - Y.C. Leong
AU  - K.A. Norman
AU  - U. Hasson
TI  - Shared experience, shared memory: a common structure for brain activity during naturalistic recall
AID  - 10.1101/035931
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 035931
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/05/035931.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/05/035931.full
AB  - Our daily lives revolve around sharing experiences and memories with others. When different people recount the same events, how similar are their underlying neural representations? In this study, participants viewed a fifty-minute audio-visual movie, then verbally described the events while undergoing functional MRI. These descriptions were completely unguided and highly detailed, lasting for up to forty minutes. As each person spoke, event-specific spatial patterns were reinstated (movie-vs.-recall correlation) in default network, medial temporal, and high-level visual areas; moreover, individual event patterns were highly discriminable and similar between people during recollection (recall-vs.-recall similarity), suggesting the existence of spatially organized memory representations. In posterior medial cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and angular gyrus, activity patterns during recall were more similar between people than to patterns elicited by the movie, indicating systematic reshaping of percept into memory across individuals. These results reveal striking similarity in how neural activity underlying real-life memories is organized and transformed in the brains of different people as they speak spontaneously about past events.