title: Shared memories reveal shared structure in neural activity across individuals.
abstract: Our lives revolve around sharing experiences and memories with others. When different people recount the same events, how similar are their underlying neural representations? Participants viewed a 50-min movie, then verbally described the events during functional MRI, producing unguided detailed descriptions lasting up to 40 min. As each person spoke, event-specific spatial patterns were reinstated in default-network, medial-temporal, and high-level visual areas. Individual event patterns were both highly discriminable from one another and similar among people, suggesting consistent spatial organization. In many high-order areas, patterns were more similar between people recalling the same event than between recall and perception, indicating systematic reshaping of percept into memory. These results reveal the existence of a common spatial organization for memories in high-level cortical areas, where encoded information is largely abstracted beyond sensory constraints, and that neural patterns during perception are altered systematically across people into shared memory representations for real-life events.
authors.affiliation: Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.|Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.|Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
authors.forename: Janice
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
authors.forename: Yuan Chang
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2499-2393
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Leong
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.|Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Christopher J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Honey
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Chung H
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Yong
authors.affiliation: Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.|Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
authors.forename: Kenneth A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Norman
authors.affiliation: Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.|Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
authors.forename: Uri
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Hasson
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001519:Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult