Temporal structure in associative retrieval

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 the temporal structure of this retrieved activity remains largely unexplored, and here we address this gap using the 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 paired with 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 separate components of the representation of the indirect stimulus appeared at distinct times during learning. The strength of retrieval of one, but not the other, representational component correlated with generalization of reward learning from direct to indirect stimuli. We suggest decomposing the temporal structure within retrieved neural representations may be key to understanding their function.

Authors

• Zeb Kurth-Nelson
• Gareth Barnes
• Dino Sejdi-
• Ray Dolan
• Peter Dayan

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.