Neural Representations of Schemas and Episodic memory using Visual Narratives

Poster Session E - Monday, April 15, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Simon Henin¹ (simon.henin@nyulangone.org), Martina Vilas², Anli Liu¹, Patricia Dugan¹, Werner Doyle¹, Daniel Friedman¹, Adeen Flinker¹, Zoe Lusk³, Josef Parvizi³, Charan Ranganath⁴, Lucia Melloni^1,5; ¹NYU School of Medicine, ²Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience in Cooperation with the Max Planck Society, ³Stanford University, ⁴UC Davis, ⁵Max-Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

Memories are flexible and dynamic, allowing us to recall past experiences and make predictions about the future based on previously experienced schemas or our episodic memories. Using high-spatial resolution intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recordings in the human brain, we explore the neural representations of internally generated schemas during visual narratives (in the form of comic strips). Utilizing decoding analyses, we examine the temporal evolution of schema processing through lower-level (e.g., occipital cortex) and higher-level (e.g., prefrontal (PFC)) regions of the brain. In addition, we show how violations of schematic knowledge are processed throughout the hierarchy, how episodic memory of schema violations change these representations over time, and how the hippocampus supports reinstatement of mnemonic neural representations over time.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic