Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.
Brown University, Providence, RI.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2023 Dec 1;35(12):1899-1918. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_02053.
Memory retrieval does not provide a perfect recapitulation of past events, but instead an imperfect reconstruction of event-specific details and general knowledge. However, it remains unclear whether this reconstruction relies on mixtures of signals from different memory systems, including one supporting general knowledge. Here, we investigate whether the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) distorts new memories because of prior category knowledge. In this preregistered experiment (n = 36), participants encoded and retrieved image-location associations. Most images' locations were clustered according to their category, but some were in random locations. With this protocol, we previously demonstrated that randomly located images were retrieved closer to their category cluster relative to their encoded locations, suggesting an influence of category knowledge. We combined this procedure with TMS delivered to the left ATL before retrieval. We separately examined event-specific details (error) and category knowledge (bias) to identify distinct signals attributable to different memory systems. We found that TMS to ATL attenuated bias in location memory, but this effect was limited to exploratory analyses of atypical category members of animal categories. The magnitude of error was not impacted, suggesting that a memory's fidelity can be decoupled from its distortion by category knowledge. This raises the intriguing possibility that retrieval is jointly supported by separable memory systems.
记忆检索不能完美地再现过去的事件，而只是对事件特定细节和一般知识的不完美重构。然而，目前尚不清楚这种重构是否依赖于不同记忆系统的信号混合，包括支持一般知识的系统。在这里，我们研究了前颞叶（ATL）是否会因先前的类别知识而扭曲新的记忆。在这个预先注册的实验中（n = 36），参与者对图像-位置的关联进行了编码和检索。大多数图像的位置根据其类别进行聚类，但有些则在随机位置。使用这种方案，我们之前证明了随机位置的图像相对于其编码位置更接近其类别簇进行检索，这表明类别知识的影响。我们将此程序与检索前左前颞叶 TMS 相结合。我们分别检查了特定于事件的细节（错误）和类别知识（偏差），以识别可归因于不同记忆系统的不同信号。我们发现，ATL 的 TMS 减弱了位置记忆中的偏差，但这种效应仅限于对动物类别的异常类别成员的探索性分析。错误的幅度没有受到影响，这表明记忆的保真度可以与其通过类别知识的失真解耦。这提出了一个有趣的可能性，即检索可以由可分离的记忆系统共同支持。
