A groundbreaking study reveals how the hippocampus, a critical brain region for memory, coordinates encoding, formation, and retrieval of memories.
A team of scientists from the Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research (CNIR) at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has made a significant discovery about how the hippocampus, a crucial brain region for memory, orchestrates multiple memory processes.
The study, led by SHIM Won Mok, associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University, and YOO Michael Seng Bum, assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at the same university, employed advanced dimensionality reduction techniques on fMRI data to demonstrate the hippocampus's central role in coordinating memory encoding, formation, and retrieval. The human brain continuously processes and integrates diverse information to form memories. For example, while watching a movie, the brain simultaneously gathers information about the characters, their relationships, and the plot's progression to later recall the entire narrative. Past research has primarily focused on how the hippocampus supports individual memory processes, such as recognizing new information, forming memories, and recalling them, but the mechanism by which it coordinates these processes remained elusive.To address this knowledge gap, the research team designed an experiment where participants watched a movie and subsequently recalled its content while undergoing fMRI scans. They analyzed two types of novelty within each movie scene: co-occurrence novelty, which measures the number of new character combinations appearing together, and valence novelty, which quantifies the shifts in character relationships. Additionally, they assessed how well participants remembered each scene ('memorability'). The study revealed that participants remembered scenes with lower novelty more accurately, shedding light on the interplay between novelty encoding and memory formation. By analyzing how the hippocampus processed novelty and memorability during movie viewing, the team investigated its role in coordinating these processes. The researchers hypothesized that the hippocampus coordinates these processes by aligning low-dimensional subspaces of neural activity, each representing a distinct memory function. Their findings confirmed this hypothesis, demonstrating: aligned subspaces for both novelty types, suggesting the hippocampus integrates diverse forms of novel information; alignment between novelty and memory formation subspaces, with stronger alignment correlating with improved memory performance; and distinct alignment patterns for retrieval, where the memory retrieval subspace aligned with memory formation but not with novelty, indicating process-specific coordination by the hippocampus.This research holds significant implications because it combined fMRI and electrophysiological methods to unveil how the hippocampus coordinates memory processes. Unlike previous studies focusing on the hippocampus's role in individual memory processes, this study emphasizes its role in integrating multiple processes by analyzing the geometric characteristics of neural activity patterns. These findings not only deepen our understanding of memory encoding and retrieval but also provide valuable insights into the hippocampus's function as a coordinator and its interaction with the neocortex
HIPPOCAMPUS MEMORY COORDINATION NEURAL ACTIVITY Fmri
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