We demonstrate that multivariate patterns of activity in the human hippocampus during the recognition and cued mental replay of long-term sequence memories contain temporal structure information in the order of seconds. By using an experimental paradigm that required participants to remember the durations of empty intervals between visually presented scene images, our study provides evidence that the human hippocampus can represent elapsed time within a sequence of events in conjunction with other forms of information, such as event content. Our findings complement rodent studies that have shown that hippocampal neurons fire at specific times during the empty delay between two events and suggest a common hippocampal neural mechanism for representing temporal information in the service of episodic memory.
We demonstrate that multivariate patterns of activity in the human hippocampus during the recognition and cued mental replay of long-term sequence memories contain temporal structure information in the order of seconds. By using an experimental paradigm that required participants to remember the durations of empty intervals between visually presented scene images, our study provides evidence that the human hippocampus can represent elapsed time within a sequence of events in conjunction with other forms of information, such as event content. Our findings complement rodent studies that have shown that hippocampal neurons fire at specific times during the empty delay between two events and suggest a common hippocampal neural mechanism for representing temporal information in the service of episodic memory.