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Remembering when: neural mechanisms underlying repetition effects

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Yoonjung Lee¹, Futing Zou², J. Benjamin Hutchinson¹, Brice A. Kuhl¹; ¹University of Oregon, ²Brown University

We often experience the same events more than once (e.g., seeing a Golden Retriever walking with its owner on your commute one day and again another day). How does this repetition influence our memory for when events occurred? Prior work has shown that greater similarity of medial temporal lobe activity patterns across repetitions predicts better temporal memory (Zou et al., 2023). One interpretation of these pattern similarity effects is that they reflect reinstatement of a prior event’s ‘temporal context.’ In recent work, we used inverted fMRI encoding models to reconstruct the content of images that were temporally adjacent to a prior encounter with a scene image (Zou, Hutchinson, & Kuhl, 2025). In the present study, we will refine this method and will test for relationships between medial temporal lobe pattern similarity and temporal context reinstatement. We will also test whether temporal context reinstatement influences temporal memory accuracy and/or induces biases in temporal memory (Sherman & Yousif, 2025). Forty-four participants will complete three fMRI sessions. In each scan run, participants will view a stream of 3-s video clips with the instruction to encode them as part of a broader narrative (a ‘movie’). Critically, some clips will reappear, with repetitions either occurring across scan runs (lag = minutes) or scan sessions (lag = days). At the end of each session, participants will be shown clips and will estimate when they were encountered. This study will reveal how repeated experiences and temporal context reinstatement shape temporal memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic