Logo image
Tracking the relation between gist and item memory over the course of long-term memory consolidation
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Tracking the relation between gist and item memory over the course of long-term memory consolidation

Tima Zeng, Alexa Tompary, Anna C Schapiro and Sharon L Thompson-Schill
eLife, v 10, e65588
14 Jul 2021
PMID: 34259626
url
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65588View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Our experiences in the world support memories not only of specific episodes but also of the generalities (the ‘gist’) across related experiences. It remains unclear how these two types of memories evolve and influence one another over time. In two experiments, 173 human participants encoded spatial locations from a distribution and reported both item memory (specific locations) and gist memory (center for the locations) across 1–2 months. Experiment 1 demonstrated that after 1 month, gist memory was preserved relative to item memory, despite a persistent positive correlation between them. Critically, item memories were biased toward the gist over time. Experiment 2 showed that a spatial outlier item changed this relationship and that the extraction of gist is sensitive to the regularities of items. Our results suggest that the gist starts to guide item memories over longer durations as their relative strengths change.

Metrics

14 Record Views
21 citations in Scopus

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Biology
Logo image