RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Shared experience, shared memory: a common structure for brain activity during naturalistic recall
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 035931
DO 10.1101/035931
A1 J. Chen
A1 Y.C. Leong
A1 K.A. Norman
A1 U. Hasson
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/05/035931.abstract
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.