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A matter of detail – material-specific structural changes after studying different kinds of learning material

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Antonia Lenders¹ (), Deniz Kumral¹, Monika Schönauer¹; ¹University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

Every time we learn a new skill or store an experience in memory, our brain undergoes functional and structural changes. Advances in neuroimaging, such as diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI), allow to non-invasively track microstructural changes by analyzing the motion of water molecules within human brain tissue. Using these methods, recent studies have demonstrated that repeated encoding and retrieval of an object–location association task leads to the rapid formation of a physical memory trace in the parietal cortex. Notably, this trace fulfills all criteria for a memory engram within just 90 minutes post-learning, highlighting the dynamic and rapid nature of memory formation. Whether microstructural memory traces differ depending on learned information remains an unanswered question. In this study, 79 participants completed an object-location learning task with repeated encoding and retrieval of image pairs depicting either objects (n=40) or scenes (n=39). DW-MRI was measured immediately after the learning task until up to 60 minutes later. We found a region in the posterior parietal cortex that was active during memory encoding and retrieval, and showed a decrease in mean diffusivity (MD), a DW-MRI marker indicating microstructural plasticity already one hour after learning. A whole-brain searchlight decoding analysis revealed that microstructural changes in this area were informative about the specific content of the previous learning material (objects vs. scenes). Our results suggest that a material-specific memory engram is rapidly formed in the posterior parietal cortex, which persists in a dormant state after the learning experience has ended.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic