What information is carried in event-level representations during naturalistic recall?

COEX 

Naturalistic recall of past episodes is idiosyncratic across people, even when individuals encoded the same events. These idiosyncrasies impose a challenge to studying the neural mechanisms supporting real-life memories. Event-level analyses are suggested to partly overcome this issue and capture the shared response across individuals. However, it is not clear what type and granularity of information are preserved in event-level representations. Across three fMRI studies, we investigated the information captured using event-level analyses. In one experiment, participants watched the same movie and one of them recounted the movie to a group of individuals naïve to the story. Using spatial pattern similarity analysis, we show that shared neural patterns across individuals in the default mode network are event-specific, are shared irrespective of the modality, and can be built from limited information. In the second study, we manipulated the interpretation of a movie after encoding that triggered the updating of past memories to incorporate new knowledge. In some regions of the default mode network, we find evidence for memory updating, but only in the scenes relevant to the new interpretation. In the last ongoing study, we asked people to recall their autobiographical memories in an emotional regulation task. We found that event-level neural representations capture the emotional state in this task. Taken together, our work suggests that event-level representations carry information about fine-grained content and emotional state during the naturalistic retrieval of past episodes.