Distinct neural mechanisms for remembering when an event occurred.

Events are often remembered as having occurred in a specific order, but almost nothing is known about how the brain encodes this temporal information. It is commonly assumed that temporal information is encoded via a single mechanism, based either on the temporal context in which the event occurred or inferred from the strength of the memory trace itself. By analyzing time-dependent changes in activity patterns, we show that the distinctiveness of contextual representations in the hippocampus and anterior and medial prefrontal cortex was associated with accurate recency memory.

Hippocampal activity patterns carry information about objects in temporal context.

The hippocampus is critical for human episodic memory, but its role remains controversial. One fundamental question concerns whether the hippocampus represents specific objects or assigns context-dependent representations to objects. Here, we used multivoxel pattern similarity analysis of fMRI data during retrieval of learned object sequences to systematically investigate hippocampal coding of object and temporal context information.

Prefrontal and medial temporal lobe activity at encoding predicts temporal context memory.

One of the defining features of episodic long-term memory is that it includes information about the temporal context in which an event occurred. Little is known about the regions that support the encoding of temporal information in the human brain, although previous work has suggested a role for the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and medial temporal lobes (MTL). Here we used event-related fMRI to examine the relationship between activity at encoding and subsequent memory for temporal context.

Age differences in default mode activity on easy and difficult spatial judgment tasks.

The default network is a system of brain areas that are engaged when the mind is not involved in goal-directed activity. Most previous studies of age-related changes in default mode processing have used verbal tasks. We studied non-verbal spatial tasks that vary in difficulty.

Cultural differences in the lateral occipital complex while viewing incongruent scenes.

Converging behavioral and neuroimaging evidence indicates that culture influences the processing of complex visual scenes. Whereas Westerners focus on central objects and tend to ignore context, East Asians process scenes more holistically, attending to the context in which objects are embedded. We investigated cultural differences in contextual processing by manipulating the congruence of visual scenes presented in an fMR-adaptation paradigm.