Putting Humpty together and pulling him apart: Accessing and unbinding the hippocampal item-context engram

Talya Sadeh, Anat Maril, Tali Bitan, Yonatan Goshen-Gottstein*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

A remarkable act of memory entails binding different forms of information. We focus on the timeless question of how the bound engram is accessed such that its component features-item and context-are extracted. To shed light on this question, we investigate the dynamics between brain structures that together mediate the binding and extraction of item and context. Converging evidence has implicated the Parahippocampal cortex (PHc) in contextual processing, the Perirhinal cortex (PRc) in item processing, and the hippocampus in item-context binding. Effective connectivity analysis was conducted on fMRI data gathered during retrieval on tests that differ with regard to the to-be-extracted information. Results revealed that recall is initiated by context-related PHc activity, followed by hippocampal item-context engram activation, and completed with retrieval of the study-item by the PRc. The reverse path was found for recognition. We thus provide novel evidence for dissociative patterns of item-context unbinding during retrieval.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)808-817
Number of pages10
JournalNeuroImage
Volume60
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2012

Funding

FundersFunder number
Charles E. Smith Family
European CommunityMIRG-CT-2007-046457
Israel Foundations Trustees29
Levy Edersheim Gitter Institute for Neuroimaging
National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel
Israel Science Foundation1418/06
Adams Super Center for Brain Studies,Tel Aviv University

    Keywords

    • Binding
    • Context
    • Dynamic causal modeling (DCM)
    • Hippocampus
    • Medial temporal lobe (MTL)
    • Memory
    • Parahippocampal cortex (PHc)
    • Perirhinal cortex (PRc)
    • Recall
    • Recognition

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