Cross-species evidence supports a role for the hippocampus in duration memory. Discrepancies in findings cloud the conditions governing hippocampal involvement. We suggest the importance of considering the hippocampus as a sequence processor. The hippocampus supports duration memory in the context of event sequences. Overlapping hippocampal mechanisms may support memory for duration and order.
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.
Hippocampal activity patterns are sensitive to temporal order and duration. Duration sensitivity is not dependant on explicit temporal processing. Findings support a temporal representation of event sequences in the hippocampus.
Surprisingly little is known about how the brain combines spatial elements to form a coherent percept. Regions that may underlie this process include the hippocampus (HC) and parahippocampal place area (PPA), regions central to spatial perception but …
Approach–avoidance conflict has been linked to anxiety and occurs when a stimulus or situation is associated with reward and punishment. Although rodent work has implicated the hippocampus in approach–avoidance conflict processing, there is limited data on whether this role applies to learned, as opposed to innate, incentive values, and whether the human hippocampus plays a similar role. Using functional neuroimaging with a novel decision-making task that controlled for perceptual and mnemonic processing, we found that the human hippocampus was significantly active when approach–avoidance conflict was present for stimuli with learned incentive values. These findings demonstrate a role for the human hippocampus in approach–avoidance decision making that cannot be explained easily by hippocampal-dependent long-term memory or spatial cognition.