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Abstract

While traditional models of systems memory consolidation postulate the reliance of freshly encoded memories on the hippocampus, recent evidence in humans and animals has shown that there are conditions under which the neocortex can rapidly acquire genuine memory engrams. Presenting data from a novel experimental paradigm, I will elaborate on the idea of concurrent memory encoding in the entire network, and specialized subsystems coding for different aspects of the memory. Participants (N=80) encoded the same abstract visual stimuli but focused either on differentiating individual stimuli or on identifying categories while undergoing functional and diffusion MRI. A naïve control group (N=40) was included to assess microstructural changes and representational similarity of the stimuli unrelated to learning. Integrating the results from multimodal MRI analyses, higher-order association areas in the posterior parietal cortex, in particular the superior parietal lobule and the precuneus, seem to have a general, integrative memory function for conceptual as well as detailed information, independent of encoding strategy. On the other hand, more down-stream areas, like the cuneus or intracalcarine cortex, as well as the hippocampus seem to have more distinct roles in processing and representation of the specifically encoded detailed or conceptual information. Taken together, I will discuss how different aspects of the same event might be embedded in a distributed memory network.