The cognitive neuroscience of memory representations

Rugg, Michael D. and Renoult, Louis (2025) The cognitive neuroscience of memory representations. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 179. ISSN 0149-7634

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Abstract

The present paper considers the cognitive neuroscience of memory from a representational perspective with the aim of shedding light on current empirical and theoretical issues. We focus on episodic memory, differentiating active versus latent, and cognitive versus neural memory representations. We adopt a causal perspective, according to which a memory representation must have a causal connection to a past event to count as a memory. We note that retrieved episodic information may nonetheless only partially determine the content of an active memory representation, which can comprise a combination of the retrieved information with semantic, schematic and situational information. We further note that, especially in the case of memories for temporally remote events, re-encoding operations likely lead to a causal chain that extends from the original experience of the event to its currently accessible memory trace. We discuss how the reinstatement framework provides a mechanistic basis for the causal linkage between an experience, the memory trace encoding it, and the episodic memory of the experience, highlighting the crucial role of hippocampal engrams in encoding patterns of neocortical activity that, when active, constitute the neural representation of an episodic memory. Finally, we discuss some of the ways in which a memory can become modified and hence distanced from the episode that precipitated it.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability statement: No data was used for the research described in the article. Funding information: This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (grant MR/S011463/1 awarded to LR) and the National Institute of Aging (grant R01AG082680 awarded to MR).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	representation,engram,causality,reinstatement,episodic memory,semantic memory,semantic memory,episodic memory,neuropsychology and physiological psychology,cognitive neuroscience,behavioral neuroscience ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3200/3206
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > UEA Experimental Philosophy Group Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Cognition, Action and Perception
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Oct 2025 13:32
Last Modified:	30 Oct 2025 10:31
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100688
DOI:	10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106417

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