Volume 30, Issue 2
COMMENTARY

Event conjunction: How the hippocampus integrates episodic memories across event boundaries

Benjamin J. Griffiths

Corresponding Author

E-mail address: benjamin.griffiths.psy@gmail.com

School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Correspondence

Benjamin J. Griffiths, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.

Email: benjamin.griffiths.psy@gmail.com

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Lluís Fuentemilla

Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

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First published: 30 September 2019

Funding information: Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Grant/Award Number: PSI2016‐80489‐P

Abstract

Our lives are a continuous stream of experience. Our episodic memories on the other hand have a definitive beginning, middle, and end. Theories of event segmentation suggest that salient changes in our environment produce event boundaries which partition the past from the present and, as a result, produce discretized memories. However, event boundaries cannot completely discretize two memories; any shared conceptual link will lead to the rapid integration of these memories. Here, we present a new framework inspired by electrophysiological research that resolves this apparent contradiction. At its heart, the framework proposes that hippocampal theta‐gamma coupling maintains a highly abstract model of an ongoing event and serves to encode this model as an episodic memory. When a second but related event begins, this theta‐gamma model is rapidly reconstructed within the hippocampus where new details of the second event can be appended to the existing event model. The event conjunction framework is the first electrophysiological explanation of how event memories can be formed at, and integrated across, event boundaries.

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