Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Lifespan Psychology, Berlin, Germany; German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Lifespan Psychology, Berlin, Germany; Division of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Mar;111:8-15. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.01.005. Epub 2018 Jan 6.
Recent neuroimaging research suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays an important role for successful memory formation that takes place in the context of activated prior knowledge. These findings led to the notion that the vmPFC integrates new information into existing knowledge structures. However, a considerable number of neuroimaging studies that have investigated memory formation in the context of prior knowledge have not found vmPFC involvement. To resolve this inconsistency, we propose a distinction between knowledge-relevance (the degree to which new information can be linked to prior knowledge) and knowledge-congruency (the perceived match between prior knowledge and the to-be-encoded information). We hypothesized that the vmPFC contributes to successful memory formation only when perceived knowledge-congruency is high, independent of knowledge-relevance. We tested this hypothesis in a design that varied both congruency and relevance during memory encoding, which was performed in the MR scanner. As predicted, the results showed that vmPFC contributions to memory formation vary as a function of knowledge-congruency, but not as a function of knowledge-relevance. Our finding contributes to elucidating the seemingly inconsistent findings in the literature and helps to specify the role of the vmPFC in memory formation.
最近的神经影像学研究表明，腹内侧前额叶皮层（vmPFC）在成功的记忆形成中起着重要作用，而这种记忆形成是在激活的先前知识的背景下发生的。这些发现导致了这样一种观点，即 vmPFC 将新信息整合到现有的知识结构中。然而，大量研究先前知识背景下的记忆形成的神经影像学研究并没有发现 vmPFC 的参与。为了解决这一不一致性，我们提出了区分知识相关性（新信息与先前知识关联的程度）和知识一致性（先前知识与待编码信息之间的感知匹配）的概念。我们假设，只有当感知到的知识一致性较高时，vmPFC 才会对成功的记忆形成做出贡献，而与知识相关性无关。我们在记忆编码过程中在磁共振扫描仪中改变了一致性和相关性，以此来检验这一假设。正如预测的那样，结果表明，vmPFC 对记忆形成的贡献随着知识一致性的变化而变化，但不受知识相关性的影响。我们的发现有助于阐明文献中看似不一致的发现，并有助于明确 vmPFC 在记忆形成中的作用。
