School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales CF10 3AT, UK
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4 Canada.
eNeuro. 2020 Apr 20;7(2). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0531-19.2020. Print 2020 Mar/Apr.
The ability to mentally travel to specific events from one's past, dubbed episodic autobiographical memory (E-AM), contributes to adaptive functioning. Nonetheless, the mechanisms underlying its typical interindividual variation remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we capitalize on existing evidence that successful performance on E-AM tasks draws on the ability to visualize past episodes and reinstate their unique spatiotemporal context. Hence, here, we test whether features of the brain's functional architecture relevant to perceptual versus conceptual processes shape individual differences in both self-rated E-AM and laboratory-based episodic memory (EM) for random visual scene sequences (visual EM). We propose that superior subjective E-AM and visual EM are associated with greater similarity in static neural organization patterns, potentially indicating greater efficiency in switching, between rest and mental states relevant to encoding perceptual information. Complementarily, we postulate that impoverished subjective E-AM and visual EM are linked to dynamic brain organization patterns implying a predisposition towards semanticizing novel perceptual information. Analyses were conducted on resting state and task-based fMRI data from 329 participants (160 women) in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) who completed visual and verbal EM assessments, and an independent gender diverse sample ( = 59) who self-rated their E-AM. Interindividual differences in subjective E-AM were linked to the same neural mechanisms underlying visual, but not verbal, EM, in general agreement with the hypothesized static and dynamic brain organization patterns. Our results suggest that higher E-AM entails more efficient processing of temporally extended information sequences, whereas lower E-AM entails more efficient semantic or gist-based processing.
个体能够在心理上回忆过去特定事件的能力，被称为情节自传体记忆（E-AM），有助于适应性功能。尽管如此，其个体间差异的潜在机制仍知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，我们利用现有的证据，即成功完成 E-AM 任务依赖于可视化过去情节并恢复其独特时空背景的能力。因此，在这里，我们测试了与知觉和概念过程相关的大脑功能架构特征是否会影响个体在自我评估的 E-AM 和基于实验室的随机视觉场景序列（视觉 EM）情节记忆方面的差异。我们提出，更好的主观 E-AM 和视觉 EM 与静态神经组织模式的相似性更高相关，这可能表明在与编码知觉信息相关的静息和心理状态之间转换的效率更高。此外，我们假设，较差的主观 E-AM 和视觉 EM 与动态大脑组织模式相关，这意味着对新颖知觉信息进行语义化的倾向更大。分析基于人类连接组计划（HCP）中 329 名参与者（160 名女性）的静息状态和基于任务的 fMRI 数据进行，这些参与者完成了视觉和言语 EM 评估，以及一个独立的性别多样化样本（n=59），他们自我评估了自己的 E-AM。个体间差异的主观 E-AM 与视觉 EM 的相同神经机制相关，而与言语 EM 不相关，这与假设的静态和动态大脑组织模式大体一致。我们的结果表明，更高的 E-AM 意味着更有效地处理时间扩展信息序列，而更低的 E-AM 意味着更有效地进行语义或主旨处理。
