The structure of experience: Examining the emergence of schematic representations in the medial prefrontal cortex

Le résumé fourni par la source

The hippocampus supports the retention of unique experiences as episodic memories. In contrast, neocortical regions including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) have been argued to support the retention of more generalized memory representations, i.e., memory schemas. These representations are thought to be extracted across multiple related experiences. Recently, we have demonstrated that the mPFC encodes such schemas of our real-life environment as well as of the people that live in it. Here, we examine how such schemas emerge de novo by immersing people in a complex and novel environment: The character-rich tv-show The Wire. Across two weeks, participants watched the entire first season and thereby learned the complex structure of its characters’ relationships. We quantified participants’ subjective schemas from repeated fine grained behavioral assessments and defined the objective relationships between the characters by their co-occurrences. Preliminary analyses indicate that objective models based on co-occurrences of the characters predict the structure of participants’ subjective schemas. These models are also reflected in the structure of neural memory representations in the mPFC. These findings elucidate how life-like experiences shape the structure of memory schemas and their neural representation.

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