Memory-guided Prediction: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Memory for Temporally Structured Informatio

The ability to remember prior experience is a core aspect of cognition. Memory can be comprised of information about individual items or contexts, but information about the temporal relationships between entities in the environment can provide not only a record of what happened in the past but also facilitate predictions about what might happen in the future. To address how temporal relationships are learned and used to facilitate predictions, the current work includes three investigations, two experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and one experiment using behavior. The reported fMRI experiments tested neural predictions from a recent model positing the existence of dissociable posterior-medial (PM) and anterior-temporal (AT) cortical networks that are thought to represent spatio-temporal relationships and item information, respectively, in the service of memory-guided behavior (Ranganath and Ritchey, 2012). In Chapter 2, representational similarity analysis was used to test for evidence of PM network involvement in supporting representations of shared temporal structure across event sequences. In Chapter 3, computational model-based fMRI was employed to assess evidence for the involvement of the AT network in representing the shared meaning of objects in a task where shared meaning could be discerned by learning to predict outcomes associated with sequentially presented pairs of object cues. In Chapter 4, we tested for behavioral evidence of increased flexibility of predictions about temporally associated stimuli following a period of memory trace stabilization. Together, the results across these investigations extend our understanding of the neural and behavioral correlates of learning and using temporal information to guide expectations and predictions about upcoming information.