Biasing perception by spatial long-term memory.

Human perception is highly flexible and adaptive. Selective processing is tuned dynamically according to current task goals and expectations to optimize behavior. Arguably, the major source of our expectations about events yet to unfold is our past experience; however, the ability of long-term memories to bias early perceptual analysis has remained untested.

Differential engagement of brain regions within a 'core' network during scene construction.

Reliving past events and imagining potential future events engages a well-established "core" network of brain areas. How the brain constructs, or reconstructs, these experiences or scenes has been debated extensively in the literature, but remains poorly understood. Here we designed a novel task to investigate this (re)constructive process by directly exploring how naturalistic scenes are built up from their individual elements.

Tracking the emergence of conceptual knowledge during human decision making.

Concepts lie at the very heart of intelligence, providing organizing principles with which to comprehend the world. Surprisingly little, however, is understood about how we acquire and deploy concepts. Here, we show that a functionally coupled circuit involving the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) underpins the emergence of conceptual knowledge and its effect on choice behavior.

Cortical midline involvement in autobiographical memory.

Recollecting autobiographical memories of personal past experiences is an integral part of our everyday lives and relies on a distributed set of brain regions. Their occurrence externally in the real world ('realness') and their self-relevance ('selfness') are two defining features of these autobiographical events. Distinguishing between personally experienced events and those that happened to other individuals, and between events that really occurred and those that were mere figments of the imagination, is clearly advantageous, yet the respective neural correlates remain unclear.

Orienting attention based on long-term memory experience.

Attentional orienting and memory are intrinsically bound, but their interaction has rarely been investigated. Here we introduce an experimental paradigm using naturalistic scenes to investigate how long-term memory can guide spatial attention and thereby enhance identification of events in the perceptual domain. In the task, stable memories of objects embedded within complex scenes guide spatial orienting.