Neural representations of naturalistic events are updated as our understanding of the past changes

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Abstract

The brain actively reshapes our understanding of past events in light of new incoming information. In the current study, we ask how the brain supports this updating process during the encoding and recall of naturalistic stimuli. One group of participants watched a movie ('The Sixth Sense') with a cinematic 'twist' at the end that dramatically changed the interpretation of previous events. Next, participants were asked to verbally recall the movie events, taking into account the new 'twist' information. Most participants updated their recall to incorporate the twist. Two additional groups recalled the movie without having to update their memories during recall: one group never saw the twist; another group was exposed to the twist prior to the beginning of the movie, and thus the twist information was incorporated both during encoding and recall. We found that providing participants with information about the twist beforehand altered neural response patterns during movie-viewing in the default mode network (DMN). Moreover, presenting participants with the twist at the end of the movie changed the neural representation of the previously-encoded information during recall in a subset of DMN regions. Further evidence for this transformation was obtained by comparing the neural activation patterns during encoding and recall and correlating them with behavioral signatures of memory updating. Our results demonstrate that neural representations of past events encoded in the DMN are dynamically integrated with new information that reshapes our understanding in natural contexts.

Data availability

Code available at: https://github.com/azadbood/sixthsenseData available at: https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds004359.v1.0.0

Article and author information

Author details

Asieh Zadbood

Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, United States

For correspondence
az2604@columbia.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9098-0510
Samuel Nastase

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7013-5275
Janice Chen

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Kenneth A Norman

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5887-9682
Uri Hasson

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH12357)

Kenneth A Norman
Uri Hasson

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants provided written informed consent prior to the experiment and received information about the conditions of the experiment and their rights. The experiment protocol and the consent forms were approved by the Institutional Review Board of Princeton University (protocol number 7883).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.