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The direction of associations: prior knowledge promotes hippocampal separation, but cortical assimilation

Oded Bein, Niv Reggev, Anat Maril
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/851204
Oded Bein
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, United States
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Niv Reggev
Psychology Department, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, 8410501, Israel
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Anat Maril
Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 91905, IsraelDepartment of Cognitive Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel
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  • For correspondence: anat.maril@mail.huji.ac.il
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Summary

What does it mean to say, “a new association is learned”? And how is this learning different when adding new information to already-existing knowledge? Here, participants associated pairs of faces while undergoing fMRI, under two different conditions: a famous, highly-familiar face with a novel face or two novel faces. We examined multivoxel activity patterns corresponding to individual faces before and after learning. In the hippocampus, paired novel faces became more similar to one another through learning. In striking contrast, members of famous-novel pairs became distinct. In the cortex, prior knowledge led to integration, but in a specific direction: the representation of the novel face became similar to that of the famous face before learning, but less so vice versa, suggesting assimilation of new into old memories. We propose that hippocampal separation might resolve interference between existing and newly learned information, allowing cortical assimilation. Associations are formed through divergent but specific neural codes, that are adaptively shaped by the internal state of the system – its prior knowledge.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted November 25, 2019.
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The direction of associations: prior knowledge promotes hippocampal separation, but cortical assimilation
Oded Bein, Niv Reggev, Anat Maril
bioRxiv 851204; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/851204
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The direction of associations: prior knowledge promotes hippocampal separation, but cortical assimilation
Oded Bein, Niv Reggev, Anat Maril
bioRxiv 851204; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/851204

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