Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.
Nat Neurosci. 2023 Jun;26(6):1080-1089. doi: 10.1038/s41593-023-01331-6. Epub 2023 May 29.
Although we perceive the world in a continuous manner, our experience is partitioned into discrete events. However, to make sense of these events, they must be stitched together into an overarching narrative-a model of unfolding events. It has been proposed that such a stitching process happens in offline neural reactivations when rodents build models of spatial environments. Here we show that, while understanding a natural narrative, humans reactivate neural representations of past events. Similar to offline replay, these reactivations occur in the hippocampus and default mode network, where reactivations are selective to relevant past events. However, these reactivations occur, not during prolonged offline periods, but at the boundaries between ongoing narrative events. These results, replicated across two datasets, suggest reactivations as a candidate mechanism for binding temporally distant information into a coherent understanding of ongoing experience.
尽管我们以连续的方式感知世界，但我们的体验是分割成离散的事件的。然而，为了理解这些事件，它们必须被缝合在一起，形成一个总体的叙述——一个事件展开的模型。有人提出，当啮齿动物构建空间环境模型时，这种缝合过程会在离线的神经再激活中发生。在这里，我们表明，当人类理解一个自然的叙述时，他们会重新激活过去事件的神经表示。类似于离线重放，这些再激活发生在海马体和默认模式网络中，其中再激活是针对相关过去事件的选择性的。然而，这些再激活不是在长时间的离线期间发生的，而是在正在进行的叙述事件之间的边界处发生的。这些结果在两个数据集上得到了复制，表明再激活是将时间上遥远的信息绑定到对正在进行的经验的连贯理解中的一个候选机制。
