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Abstract

Electrophysiological data disclose rich dynamics in patterns of neural activity evoked by sen-sory objects. Retrieving such objects from memory reinstates components of this activity. In humans thetemporal structure of this retrieved activity remains largely unexplored, and here we address this gap usingthe spatiotemporal precision of magnetoencephalography (MEG). In a sensory preconditioning paradigm,‘indirect’ objects were paired with ‘direct’ objects to form associative links, and the latter were then pairedwith rewards. Using multivariate analysis methods we examined the short-time evolution of neural repre-sentations of indirect objects retrieved during reward-learning about direct objects. We found two separatecomponents of the representation of the indirect stimulus appeared at distinct times during learning. Thestrength of retrieval of one, but not the other, representational component correlated with generalizationof reward learning from direct to indirect stimuli. We suggest decomposing the temporal structure withinretrieved neural representations may be key to understanding their function.