Qin Shaozheng, Piekema Carinne, Petersson Karl Magnus, Han Buxin, Luo Jing, Fernández Guillén
Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), 100101, Beijing, China.
Neuroimage. 2007 Oct 15;38(1):212-22. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.07.020. Epub 2007 Aug 3.
Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we identified brain regions involved in storing associations of events discontinuous in time into long-term memory. Participants were scanned while memorizing item-triplets including simultaneous and discontinuous associations. Subsequent memory tests showed that participants remembered both types of associations equally well. First, by constructing the contrast between the subsequent memory effects for discontinuous associations and simultaneous associations, we identified the left posterior parahippocampal region, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the basal ganglia, posterior midline structures, and the middle temporal gyrus as being specifically involved in transforming discontinuous associations into episodic memory. Second, we replicated that the prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) especially the hippocampus are involved in associative memory formation in general. Our findings provide evidence for distinct neural operation(s) that supports the binding and storing discontinuous associations in memory. We suggest that top-down signals from the prefrontal cortex and MTL may trigger reactivation of internal representation in posterior midline structures of the first event, thus allowing it to be associated with the second event. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex together with basal ganglia may support this encoding operation by executive and binding processes within working memory, and the posterior parahippocampal region may play a role in binding and memory formation.
利用事件相关功能磁共振成像技术，我们确定了大脑中参与将时间上不连续的事件关联存储到长期记忆中的区域。在参与者记忆包括同时性和不连续性关联的三元组项目时对其进行扫描。随后的记忆测试表明，参与者对这两种关联的记忆效果相当。首先，通过构建不连续关联和同时性关联的后续记忆效应之间的对比，我们确定左后海马旁区域、背外侧前额叶皮层、基底神经节、后中线结构和颞中回特别参与将不连续关联转化为情景记忆。其次，我们再次验证了前额叶皮层和内侧颞叶（MTL），尤其是海马体，总体上参与关联记忆的形成。我们的研究结果为支持在记忆中绑定和存储不连续关联的独特神经操作提供了证据。我们认为，来自前额叶皮层和MTL的自上而下的信号可能会触发第一个事件在后中线结构中的内部表征的重新激活，从而使其能够与第二个事件相关联。背外侧前额叶皮层与基底神经节可能通过工作记忆中的执行和绑定过程来支持这种编码操作，而后海马旁区域可能在绑定和记忆形成中发挥作用。
