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Unitization Encoding and Contextual Retrieval Reduce Interference of Event Boundaries on Temporal Order Memory
Ye Qun, Wu Yuechen, Liu Kaige
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2026, Vol. 49 ›› Issue (4) : 874-887.
PDF(968 KB)
PDF(968 KB)
Unitization Encoding and Contextual Retrieval Reduce Interference of Event Boundaries on Temporal Order Memory
Although human experience unfolds continuously, memory organizes this flow into discrete, meaningful events through a process called event segmentation. Event boundaries, the points at which segments transition, are often triggered by shifts in context, goals, or perceptual information. While crucial for organizing experience, event boundaries frequently impair memory for the temporal order of information encountered across them, a phenomenon termed the event boundary effect. This effect is robust, observed across various paradigms and timescales, suggesting that boundaries disrupt the encoding or retrieval of temporal relationships between items belonging to different events. However, empirical findings regarding boundary effects have been inconsistent. While numerous studies confirm the detrimental impact of boundaries on temporal memory, some research suggests that under specific conditions, such as high unitization encoding, this impairment can be substantially reduced or even eliminated. The inconsistency of these findings and the insufficient exploration of regulatory conditions in existing studies highlight the need to systematically examine the malleability of event boundary effects and identify the key factors that modulate their impact on temporal order memory..
Following an a priori power analysis, fifty undergraduate participants (27 male; Mage = 19.68 years, SD = 1.56 years) were recruited for Experiment 1. Participants were randomly assigned to context-present or context-absent retrieval conditions. During encoding, they viewed sequences of object-scene background pairs designed to produce three levels of bottom-up unitization: high (semantically coherent backgrounds), medium (moderately coherent), and low (incoherent). Each sequence contained an event boundary defined by a background context change. At retrieval, participants performed relative recency judgments for item pairs drawn either within the same event or across the boundary. In the context-present condition, retrieval trials included the original background context; in the context-absent condition, items were presented against neutral backgrounds. A 2 (Context: present vs. absent) × 2 (Boundary: within vs. across) × 3 (Unitization: high vs. medium vs. low) mixed ANOVA on temporal order accuracy revealed significant main effects of Boundary, F(1, 45) = 16.55, p <.001, ηp2 =.07, with within-boundary pairs (M =.70) remembered more accurately than across-boundary pairs (M =.62, p <.001, Cohen’s d =.55); and of Unitization, F(2, 90) = 7.18, p<.001, ηp2=.04, with medium unitization (M =.70) showing significantly higher temporal order accuracy than both low unitization (M =.65, p <.05, Cohen's d =.34) and high unitization (M =.63, p<.01, Cohen's d=.45). Importantly, the joint analysis revealed that in the high unitization condition, boundary effects were eliminated. The accuracy of responses across boundary (M =.66) did not differ from that of responses within boundary (M =.61, p >.05). Although context presentation also improved temporal order memory overall, the three-way interaction was not significant. This suggests that context presentation and encoding unitization operated as relatively independent regulatory mechanisms.
In Experiment 2, 75 undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of three encoding-strategy groups to induce top-down unitization levels: interactive imagery (high unitization), conceptual definition (medium), and item comparison (low). During encoding, participants followed strategy-specific instructions to process each item pair; each sequence again contained an event boundary marked by a change in background context. After a distractor task, temporal order and source memory were assessed for within- and across-boundary pairs without contextual backgrounds to purely examine the effects of encoding strategies. A 2 (Boundary: within vs. across) × 3 (Unitization: high vs. medium vs. low) mixed ANOVA on temporal order accuracy showed a significant Boundary effect, F(1, 72) = 7.28, p <.01, ηp2 =.04, with within-boundary performance (M =.68) exceeding across-boundary (M =.61, p<.01, Cohen’s d =.38), and a robust Unitization effect, F(2, 72) = 15.73, p <.001, ηp2 =.18, reflecting higher accuracy in the interactive imagery group (M =.72) than in the conceptual definition (M =.67) and item comparison groups (M =.55). Critically, a significant Boundary × Unitization interaction, F(2, 72) = 3.29, p <.05, ηp2=.04, indicated that only the interactive imagery group showed no significant boundary effect, demonstrating that effective top-down unitization can neutralize boundary-induced fragmentation.
Across two experiments, we demonstrated that both perceptually driven (bottom-up) and strategically guided (top-down) unitization at encoding significantly reduce the disruptive impact of event boundaries on temporal order memory. Our findings reveal a crucial mechanistic shift from "retrieval support" to "encoding optimization": rather than relying solely on external scaffolding during retrieval, high-quality integrated representations formed during encoding can proactively resist boundary-induced segmentation. Consistent enhancements in source memory accuracy and temporal order improvements provide direct evidence that unitization encoding strengthens the quality of item-context binding rather than merely reinforcing inter-item associations. These results demonstrate the malleability of event boundary effects and identify the modifiable conditions that can optimize temporal memory encoding and retrieval of complex experiences. Future research should explore the potential compensatory interactions between encoding unitization and retrieval context support, and employ neuroimaging to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying unitization-mediated boundary attenuation. Clinically and educationally, training individuals to form integrated representations and leverage contextual details may enhance memory for temporal sequences in everyday life.
episodic memory / event boundary / temporal order memory / unitization / association
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当两个或两个以上项目进行一体化编码时, 熟悉性也能够支持联结再认, 这一观点已经得到大量研究证据的支持。然而, 关于一体化如何影响联结再认和构成联结的单个项目再认仍存在分歧。通过回顾现有研究发现：(1)一体化一致性是调节一体化与联结再认关系的重要因素; (2)认知资源有限和新/旧词语义相关性是影响一体化对项目再认作用的重要因素; (3)一体化的发生机制存在“项目假说”、“图式假说”以及“精细加工假说”三种可能的理论解释。未来研究不仅需要控制一体化一致性, 还可以比较不同一体化方式的作用大小以及探索一体化效应的毕生发展规律。
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时间顺序信息作为记忆项目之间的重要联结要素之一, 易受到情绪的干扰。本研究通过3项实验探究编码方式与叙事连贯性是否以及如何调节情绪对于时间顺序记忆的干扰。实验1采用2 (编码方式：叙事编码/离散编码) × 3 (情绪类型：正性/负性/中性)的混合实验设计, 其中编码方式为被试间变量, 探究编码方式是否能调节图片材料中情绪信息对时间顺序记忆的干扰。结果显示, 在离散编码组, 负性情绪条件下的时间顺序记忆正确率显著比其他两种条件低; 相反, 在叙事编码组, 三种情绪类型下的时间顺序记忆没有显著差异。实验2采用两种情绪类型(中性和负性)的词语刺激, 检验编码方式对时间顺序记忆的影响是否跨材料具有普适性。实验3通过操纵项目之间的叙事连贯性程度, 进一步探究上述效应是否依赖于项目间连贯性程度。结果显示, 上述叙事编码效应仅在项目之间具有高连贯性时出现。本研究不仅发现了叙事编码对于情绪记忆中时间信息的保持机制, 还指明了叙事编码效应中连贯性程度的重要性。
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先前研究表明, 事件边界会增强边界处来源记忆、削弱跨边界的时间顺序记忆, 但对于两者之间是否存在一种权衡关系, 以及内在的、具有社会性意义的变化作为事件边界是如何影响记忆的, 尚鲜有研究。本研究以奖赏预测误差(reward prediction errors, RPE)作为事件边界, 通过两个行为实验和一个ERP实验, 探讨RPE事件边界对时间顺序记忆和来源记忆的影响。结果发现, RPE事件边界增强了边界处信息的来源记忆, 高RPE事件边界引发了记忆权衡效应; 相对于事件内/非边界条件, 跨事件/边界条件记忆的正确提取诱发出更大的N400波幅, 时间顺序记忆的激活主要集中在头皮中前部, 来源记忆的激活主要集中在头皮中后部。本研究表明, 事件边界的切分强度是影响记忆权衡效应的重要因素, N400成分可能是反映事件边界对情景记忆的整合与切分的重要指标。
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During realistic, continuous perception, humans automatically segment experiences into discrete events. Using a novel model of cortical event dynamics, we investigate how cortical structures generate event representations during narrative perception and how these events are stored to and retrieved from memory. Our data-driven approach allows us to detect event boundaries as shifts between stable patterns of brain activity without relying on stimulus annotations and reveals a nested hierarchy from short events in sensory regions to long events in high-order areas (including angular gyrus and posterior medial cortex), which represent abstract, multimodal situation models. High-order event boundaries are coupled to increases in hippocampal activity, which predict pattern reinstatement during later free recall. These areas also show evidence of anticipatory reinstatement as subjects listen to a familiar narrative. Based on these results, we propose that brain activity is naturally structured into nested events, which form the basis of long-term memory representations.Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Semantic memory includes all acquired knowledge about the world and is the basis for nearly all human activity, yet its neurobiological foundation is only now becoming clear. Recent neuroimaging studies demonstrate two striking results: the participation of modality-specific sensory, motor, and emotion systems in language comprehension, and the existence of large brain regions that participate in comprehension tasks but are not modality-specific. These latter regions, which include the inferior parietal lobe and much of the temporal lobe, lie at convergences of multiple perceptual processing streams. These convergences enable increasingly abstract, supramodal representations of perceptual experience that support a variety of conceptual functions including object recognition, social cognition, language, and the remarkable human capacity to remember the past and imagine the future.Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Efficient navigation from one place to another is facilitated by the ability to use spatial boundaries to segment routes into their component parts. Similarly, memory for individual episodes relies on the ability to use shifts in spatiotemporal contexts to segment the ongoing stream of experience. The segmentation of experiences in spatial and episodic domains may therefore share neural underpinnings, manifesting in similar behavioral phenomena and cognitive biases. Here, we review evidence for such shared mechanisms, focusing on the key role of boundaries in spatial and episodic memory. We propose that a fundamental event boundary detection mechanism enables navigation in both the spatial and episodic domains, and serves to form cohesive representations that can be used to predict and guide future behavior.Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Everyday life consists of a continuous stream of information, yet somehow we remember the past as distinct episodic events. Prominent models posit that event segmentation is driven by erroneous predictions about how current experiences are unfolding. Yet this perspective fails to explain how memories become integrated or separated in the absence of prior knowledge. Here, we propose that contextual stability dictates the temporal organization of events in episodic memory. To support this view, we summarize new findings showing that neural measures of event organization index how ongoing changes in external contextual cues and internal representations of time influence different forms of episodic memory.
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Life's episodes unfold against a context that changes with time. Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed significant findings about how specific areas of the human brain may support the representation of temporal information in memory. A consistent theme in these studies is that the hippocampus appears to play a central role in representing temporal context, as operationalized in neuroimaging studies of arbitrary lists of items, sequences of items, or meaningful, lifelike events. Additionally, activity in a posterior medial cortical network may reflect the representation of generalized temporal information for meaningful events. The hippocampus, posterior medial network, and other regions-particularly in prefrontal cortex-appear to play complementary roles in memory for temporal context.
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Every day, we encounter far more information than we could possibly remember. Thus, our memory systems must organize and prioritize the details from an experience that can adaptively guide the storage and retrieval of specific episodic events. Prior work has shown that shifts in internal goal states can function as event boundaries, chunking experiences into distinct and memorable episodes. In addition, at short delays, memory for contextual information at boundaries has been shown to be enhanced compared with items within each event. However, it remains unclear if these memory enhancements are limited to features that signal a meaningful transition between events. To determine how changes in dynamic goal states influence the organization and content of long-term memory, we designed a 2-day experiment in which participants viewed a series of black-and-white objects surrounded by a color border on a two-by-two grid. The location of the object on the grid determined which of two tasks participants performed on a given trial. To examine if distinct types of goal shifts modulate the effects of event segmentation, we changed the border color, the task, or both after every four items in a sequence. We found that goal shifts influenced temporal memory in a manner consistent with the formation of distinct events. However, for subjective memory representations in particular, these effects differed by the type of event boundary. Furthermore, to examine if goal shifts lead to the prioritization of goal-relevant features in longer lasting memories, we tested source memory for each object's color and grid location both immediately and after a 24-hr delay. On the immediate test, boundaries enhanced the memory for all concurrent source features compared with nonboundary items, but only if those boundaries involved a goal shift. In contrast, after a delay, the source memory was selectively enhanced for the feature relevant to the goal shift. These findings suggest that goals can adaptively structure memories by prioritizing contextual features that define a unique episode in memory.© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Recent functional imaging work supports the view that item and relational memory depend upon distinct encoding operations within the medial temporal lobe. Specifically, emerging findings demonstrate that the level of engagement of perirhinal cortex predicts later memory for individual items, whereas the level of hippocampal processing correlates with later relational memory, or recovery of additional episodic details. Furthermore, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence in humans suggests that medial temporal lobe cortical input structures, the perirhinal and posterior parahippocampal cortices, differentially participate in the encoding of objects and their context, providing domain-specific input to the hippocampus. Taken together, these data help to construct a working model of how distinct medial temporal lobe structures participate in episodic memory formation with domain-general relational binding mechanisms supported by the hippocampus and provide emerging evidence for domain-specificity within the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices.
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Remembering the sequence of events is critical for deriving meaning from our experiences and guiding behavior. Prior investigations into the function of the human hippocampus have focused on its more general role in associative binding, but recent work has focused on understanding its specific role in encoding and preserving the temporal order of experiences. In this review we summarize recent work in humans examining hippocampal contributions to sequence learning. We distinguish the learning of sequential relationships through repetition from the rapid, episodic acquisition of sequential associations. Taken together, this research begins to clarify the link between hippocampal representations and the preservation of the order of events. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Theories of episodic memory have generally proposed that individual memory traces are linked together by a representation of context that drifts slowly over time. Recent data challenge the notion that contextual drift is always slow and passive. In particular, changes in one's external environment or internal model induce discontinuities in memory that are reflected in sudden changes in neural activity, suggesting that context can shift abruptly. Furthermore, context change effects are sensitive to top-down goals, suggesting that contextual drift may be an active process. These findings call for revising models of the role of context in memory, in order to account for abrupt contextual shifts and the controllable nature of context change.
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Recent studies have revealed the existence of hippocampal neurons that fire at successive moments in temporally structured experiences. Several studies have shown that such temporal coding is not attributable to external events, specific behaviours or spatial dimensions of an experience. Instead, these cells represent the flow of time in specific memories and have therefore been dubbed 'time cells'. The firing properties of time cells parallel those of hippocampal place cells; time cells thus provide an additional dimension that is integrated with spatial mapping. The robust representation of both time and space in the hippocampus suggests a fundamental mechanism for organizing the elements of experience into coherent memories.
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Experiences unfold over time, but little is known about the mechanisms that support the formation of coherent episodic memories for temporally extended events. Recent work in animals has provided evidence for signals in hippocampus that could link events across temporal gaps; however, it is unknown whether and how such signals might be related to later memory for temporal information in humans. We measured patterns of fMRI BOLD activity as people encoded items that were separated in time and manipulated the presence of shared or distinct context across items. We found that hippocampal pattern similarity in the BOLD response across trials predicted later temporal memory decisions when context changed. By contrast, pattern similarity in lateral occipital cortex was related to memory only when context remained stable. These data provide evidence in humans that representational stability in hippocampus across time may be a mechanism for temporal memory organization. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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G*Power (Erdfelder, Faul, & Buchner, 1996) was designed as a general stand-alone power analysis program for statistical tests commonly used in social and behavioral research. G*Power 3 is a major extension of, and improvement over, the previous versions. It runs on widely used computer platforms (i.e., Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4) and covers many different statistical tests of the t, F, and chi2 test families. In addition, it includes power analyses for z tests and some exact tests. G*Power 3 provides improved effect size calculators and graphic options, supports both distribution-based and design-based input modes, and offers all types of power analyses in which users might be interested. Like its predecessors, G*Power 3 is free.
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Past work has shown that changes in encoding contexts (context shifts) act as boundaries across encountered items and can impair temporal memory. We address two questions about this effect: whether conceptual similarity among contexts creating a boundary can alleviate temporal memory impairments and if this effect holds for different forms of contexts (spatial vs. categorical). In a between-subjects design, participants studied the order of sequentially presented faces (items), each presented with an associated context. One group was shown images of a room (spatial) and the other images of a dessert (categorical) as the context. For both, boundaries between contexts with overlapping (similar) or non-overlapping (distinct) conceptual features were introduced. At test, participants performed a recency judgment for pairs of items that crossed or did not cross a context boundary at encoding and recalled whether they were encoded within the same, similar, or distinct context. For both groups, recency judgments were more accurate for item pairs from similar than distinct contexts, but memory for the context relationship between items was more accurate for items from distinct than similar contexts. Our findings suggest that conceptual knowledge impacts how events are parsed during encoding and affects temporal associations formed in episodic memory.
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When remembering the past, we typically recall 'events' that are bounded in time and space. However, as we navigate our environment our senses receive a continuous stream of information. How do we create discrete long-term episodic memories from continuous input? Although previous research has provided evidence for a role of spatial boundaries in the online segmentation of our sensory experience within working memory, it is not known how this segmentation contributes to subsequent long-term episodic memory. Here we show that the presence of a spatial boundary at encoding (a doorway between two rooms) impairs participants' later ability to remember the order that objects were presented in. A sequence of two objects presented in the same room in a virtual reality environment is more accurately remembered than a sequence of two objects presented in adjoining rooms. The results are captured by a simple model in which items are associated to a context representation that changes gradually over time, and changes more rapidly when crossing a spatial boundary. We therefore provide the first evidence that the structure of long-term episodic memory is shaped by the presence of a spatial boundary and provide constraints on the nature of the interaction between working memory and long-term memory.Copyright © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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People make sense of continuous streams of observed behavior in part by segmenting them into events. Event segmentation seems to be an ongoing component of everyday perception. Events are segmented simultaneously at multiple timescales, and are grouped hierarchically. Activity in brain regions including the posterior temporal and parietal cortex and lateral frontal cortex increases transiently at event boundaries. The parsing of ongoing activity into events is related to the updating of working memory, to the contents of long-term memory, and to the learning of new procedures. Event segmentation might arise as a side effect of an adaptive mechanism that integrates information over the recent past to improve predictions about the near future.
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It is widely accepted that associative recognition can be supported by familiarity through integrating more than two stimuli into a unit, but there are still three unsolved questions: (1) how unitization affects recollection-based associative recognition; (2) whether it is necessary to match the level of unitization (LOU) between original and rearranged pairs, which was term as unitization-congruence (UC); (3) whether unitization can occur at encoding or at retrieval. The purposes of this study are to try to answer these questions. During the encoding phase, the participants were asked to learn compound words and unrelated word pairs, and during the retrieval phase, they needed to distinguish intact pairs from rearranged consistent and rearranged inconsistent pairs with "remember/know" paradigm. The results showed that (1) the role of unitization in recollection was moderated by UC; (2) Under the consistent UC condition, unitization could improve familiarity-based associative recognition without affecting recollection-based associative recognition, while under the inconsistent UC condition, unitization could improve familiarity-based and recollection-based associative recognition simultaneously, these results indicated that it was necessary to match the LOU between original and rearranged pairs; (3) unitization at encoding could support familiarity-based associative recognition, while unitization at retrieval did not. In briefly, unitization at encoding could improve associative recognition and this effect was moderated by UC, while unitization at retrieval did not affect associative recognition.© 2020 Liu et al.; Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
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Traditional view holds that associative recognition require recollection while familiarity can't support associative recognition. However, recent research indicate that familiarity can also contribute to associative recognition when the stimuli are unitized in encoding. Here, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of retrieval of word and picture stimuli in three encoding conditions. Semantically unrelated word pairs or picture pairs were encoded in concept definition, interactive imagery, and item comparison conditions, separately. In test, the participants were required to discriminate between old pairs that appeared in the same pairing as in study, rearranged pairs that appeared in different pairings in study, or completely new pairs. The behavioral results revealed that higher associative recognition was observed in interactive imagery condition than in concept definition condition, with item comparison condition eliciting the worst recognition, regardless of word or picture stimuli. ERP results of word stimuli revealed that the FN400 old/new effect was solely elicited in concept definition and interactive imagery conditions, but not in item comparison condition. However, ERP results of picture stimuli revealed that the late FN400 old/new effect was observed in three encoding conditions and that larger magnitude of old/new effect was elicited in item comparison condition than in interactive imagery condition. There may be different neural mechanisms of unitization on associative recognition for word and picture stimuli. These findings suggested that the pattern of engagement of familiarity during successful retrieval was dependent on the stimulating properties and the encoding conditions. We will discuss the possibility that top-down unitization which manipulates two unrelated stimuli through instructions may lead to the engagement of specific forms of familiarity-association familiarity and item familiarity.Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Narratives may provide a general context, unrestricted by space and time, which can be used to organize episodic memories into networks of related events. However, it is not clear how narrative contexts are represented in the brain. Here we test the novel hypothesis that the formation of narrative-based contextual representations in humans relies on the same hippocampal mechanisms that enable formation of spatiotemporal contexts in rodents. Participants watched a movie consisting of two interleaved narratives while we monitored their brain activity using fMRI. We used representational similarity analysis, a type of multivariate pattern analysis, which uses across-voxel correlations as a proxy for neural-pattern similarity, to examine whether the patterns of neural activity can be used to differentiate between narratives and recurring narrative elements, such as people and locations. We demonstrate that the neural activity patterns in the hippocampus differentiate between event nodes (people and locations) and narratives (different stories) and that these narrative-context representations diverge gradually over time akin to remapping-induced spatial maps represented by rodent place cells.
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The authors present a computational neural-network model of how the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe cortex (MTLC) contribute to recognition memory. The hippocampal component contributes by recalling studied details. The MTLC component cannot support recall, but one can extract a scalar familiarity signal from MTLC that tracks how well a test item matches studied items. The authors present simulations that establish key differences in the operating characteristics of the hippocampal-recall and MTLC-familiarity signals and identify several manipulations (e.g., target-lure similarity, interference) that differentially affect the 2 signals. They also use the model to address the stochastic relationship between recall and familiarity and the effects of partial versus complete hippocampal lesions on recognition.((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)
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PsychoPy is an application for the creation of experiments in behavioral science (psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, etc.) with precise spatial control and timing of stimuli. It now provides a choice of interface; users can write scripts in Python if they choose, while those who prefer to construct experiments graphically can use the new Builder interface. Here we describe the features that have been added over the last 10 years of its development. The most notable addition has been that Builder interface, allowing users to create studies with minimal or no programming, while also allowing the insertion of Python code for maximal flexibility. We also present some of the other new features, including further stimulus options, asynchronous time-stamped hardware polling, and better support for open science and reproducibility. Tens of thousands of users now launch PsychoPy every month, and more than 90 people have contributed to the code. We discuss the current state of the project, as well as plans for the future.
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The structure of events can influence later memory for information that is embedded in them, with evidence indicating that event boundaries can both impair and enhance memory. The current study explored whether the presence of event boundaries during encoding can structure information to improve memory. In Experiment 1, memory for a list of words was tested in which event structure was manipulated by having participants walk through a doorway, or not, halfway through the word list. In Experiment 2, memory for lists of words was tested in which event structure was manipulated using computer windows. Finally, in Experiments 3 and 4, event structure was manipulated by having event shifts described in narrative texts. The consistent finding across all of these methods and materials was that memory was better when the information was distributed across two events rather than combined into a single event. Moreover, Experiment 4 demonstrated that increasing the number of event boundaries from one to two increased the memory benefit. These results are interpreted in the context of the Event Horizon Model of event cognition. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Research on event cognition is rapidly developing and is revealing fundamental aspects of human cognition. In this paper, we review recent and current work that is driving this field forward. We first outline the Event Horizon Model, which broadly describes the impact of event boundaries on cognition and memory. Then, we address recent work on event segmentation, the role of event cognition in working memory and long-term memory, including event model updating, and long term retention. Throughout we also consider how event cognition varies across individuals and groups of people and consider the neural mechanisms involved.
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The importance of the medial temporal lobe to episodic memory has been recognized for decades. Recent human fMRI findings have begun to delineate the functional roles of different MTL regions, most notably the hippocampus, for the retrieval of episodic memories. Importantly, these studies have also identified a network of cortical regions--each interconnected with the MTL--that are also consistently engaged during successful episodic retrieval. Along with the MTL these regions appear to constitute a content-independent network that acts in concert with cortical regions representing the contents of retrieval to support consciously accessible representations of prior experiences.Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Emotion enhances episodic memory, an effect thought to be an adaptation to prioritize the memories that best serve evolutionary fitness. However, viewing this effect largely in terms of prioritizing what to encode or consolidate neglects broader rational considerations about what sorts of associations should be formed at encoding, and which should be retrieved later. Although neurobiological investigations have provided many mechanistic clues about how emotional arousal modulates item memory, these effects have not been wholly integrated with the cognitive and computational neuroscience of memory more generally. Here we apply the Context Maintenance and Retrieval Model (CMR; Polyn, Norman, & Kahana, 2009) to this problem by extending it to describe the way people may represent and process emotional information. A number of ways to operationalize the effect of emotion were tested. The winning emotional CMR (eCMR) model conceptualizes emotional memory effects as arising from the modulation of a process by which memories become bound to ever-changing temporal and emotional contexts. eCMR provides a good qualitative fit for the emotional list-composition effect and the emotional oddball effect, illuminating how these effects are jointly determined by the interplay of encoding and retrieval processes. eCMR can account for the increased advantage of emotional memories in delayed memory tests by assuming a limited ability to reinstate the temporal context of encoding after a delay. By leveraging the rich tradition of temporal context models, eCMR helps integrate existing effects of emotion and provides a powerful tool to test mechanisms by which emotion affects memory in a broad range of paradigms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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| [54] |
Events make up much of our lived experience, and the perceptual mechanisms that represent events in experience have pervasive effects on action control, language use, and remembering. Event representations in both perception and memory have rich internal structure and connections one to another, and both are heavily informed by knowledge accumulated from previous experiences. Event perception and memory have been identified with specific computational and neural mechanisms, which show protracted development in childhood and are affected by language use, expertise, and brain disorders and injuries. Current theoretical approaches focus on the mechanisms by which events are segmented from ongoing experience, and emphasize the common coding of events for perception, action, and memory. Abetted by developments in eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and computer science, research on event perception and memory is moving from small-scale laboratory analogs to the complexity of events in the wild.
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| [55] |
People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here the authors propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in predictions arise, an event boundary is perceived. According to the theory, the perception of events depends on both sensory cues and knowledge structures that represent previously learned information about event parts and inferences about actors' goals and plans. Neurological and neurophysiological data suggest that representations of events may be implemented by structures in the lateral prefrontal cortex and that perceptual prediction error is calculated and evaluated by a processing pathway, including the anterior cingulate cortex and subcortical neuromodulatory systems.
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| [56] |
Events can be understood in terms of their temporal structure. The authors first draw on several bodies of research to construct an analysis of how people use event structure in perception, understanding, planning, and action. Philosophy provides a grounding for the basic units of events and actions. Perceptual psychology provides an analogy to object perception: Like objects, events belong to categories, and, like objects, events have parts. These relationships generate 2 hierarchical organizations for events: taxonomies and partonomies. Event partonomies have been studied by looking at how people segment activity as it happens. Structured representations of events can relate partonomy to goal relationships and causal structure; such representations have been shown to drive narrative comprehension, memory, and planning. Computational models provide insight into how mental representations might be organized and transformed. These different approaches to event structure converge on an explanation of how multiple sources of information interact in event perception and conception.
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