Mnemonic convergence in the human hippocampus.

Abstract

The ability to form associations between a multitude of events is the hallmark of episodic memory. Computational models have espoused the importance of the hippocampus as convergence zone, binding different aspects of an episode into a coherent representation, by integrating information from multiple brain regions. However, evidence for this long-held hypothesis is limited, since previous work has largely focused on representational and network properties of the hippocampus in isolation. Here we identify the hippocampus as mnemonic convergence zone, using a combination of multivariate pattern and graph-theoretical network analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging data from humans performing an associative memory task. We observe overlap of conjunctive coding and hub-like network attributes in the hippocampus. These results provide evidence for mnemonic convergence in the hippocampus, underlying the integration of distributed information into episodic memory representations.