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Contributions of medial temporal lobe structures to viewpoint-invariant visual object familiarity with and without wakeful rest

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Pierre-Yves Jonin^1,2 (pierreyves.jonin@chu-rennes.fr), Camille Hou¹, Gabriel Besson^3,4,5; ¹CHU Rennes, Centre Mémoire de Ressources et de Recherches, Rennes, France, ²Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, Inserm, IRISA UMR 6074, EMPENN ERL U 1228, Rennes, France, ³CINEICC, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Coimbra, Portugal, ⁴Proaction Lab, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Coimbra, Portugal, ⁵GIGA-Cyclotron Research Center Human Imaging, University of Liège, Belgium

The nature and neural substrates of the mnemonic representations that support human’s remarkable ability to rapidly recognize visual objects remains unclear. Recognition memory paradigms rarely address our ease and speed in recognizing individual objects, namely, beyond changes in viewpoint and against highly similar lures. We further ignore whether wakeful rest, supposedly involved in consolidation, plays a role in fast familiarity. Here, we tested the hypotheses that 1) fast familiarity for individual objects is spared in aging or selective hippocampal damage, but impaired after damage to the perirhinal cortex; and 2) short wakeful rest enhance the viewpoint-invariance of mnemonic representations of objects. 59 healthy young and old participants, and 3 patients with either selective hippocampal or perirhinal damage, underwent a speeded recognition memory paradigm, minimizing the diagnosticity of conceptual and perceptual fluency cues: targets and lures belonged to the same subordinate categories, and target viewpoints differed between study and test. Fast familiarity was assessed after a 2-minutes period of either wakeful rest, or spatial navigation preventing cognitive rest. Across these two rest conditions, both healthy elderly participants and patients with hippocampal damage performed successfully, but the patient with perirhinal damage was severely impaired. Wakeful rest uniquely protected the young against false alarms for highly confusable objects. Overall, we thus bring novel evidence supporting the role of the perirhinal cortex in building viewpoint-invariant representations of visual objects, and underline converging evidence that wakeful rest may modulate this mnemonic representation through hippocampus-dependent pathways.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other