Hippocampal control of repetition effects for associative stimuli.

Recent findings suggest that repetition effects interact with episodic memory processes that are putatively supported by the hippocampus. Thus, the formation or refinement of episodic memories may be related to a modulating signal from the hippocampus to the neocortex which leads to sparser or more extended stimulus representations (repetition suppression or enhancement), depending on the type of stimulus and the brain site. This framework suggests that hippocampal activity during the initial presentation of a stimulus correlates with the magnitude of repetition effects.

Memory consolidation by replay of stimulus-specific neural activity.

Memory consolidation transforms initially labile memory traces into more stable representations. One putative mechanism for consolidation is the reactivation of memory traces after their initial encoding during subsequent sleep or waking state. However, it is still unknown whether consolidation of individual memory contents relies on reactivation of stimulus-specific neural representations in humans.

Inferring directional interactions from transient signals with symbolic transfer entropy.

We extend the concept of symbolic transfer entropy to enable the time-resolved investigation of directional relationships between coupled dynamical systems from short and transient noisy time series. For our approach, we consider an observed ensemble of a sufficiently large number of time series as multiple realizations of a process. We derive an index that quantifies the preferred direction of transient interactions and assess its significance using a surrogate-based testing scheme.

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation is associated with memory formation for predictable rewards.

During reinforcement learning, dopamine release shifts from the moment of reward consumption to the time point when the reward can be predicted. Previous studies provide consistent evidence that reward-predicting cues enhance long-term memory (LTM) formation of these items via dopaminergic projections to the ventral striatum. However, it is less clear whether memory for items that do not precede a reward but are directly associated with reward consumption is also facilitated.