Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding and retrieval.

People who experience the same event often remember it differently. This study examined whether similarity in what people recall is reflected in shared brain activity patterns. Twenty-four participants watched and later recounted two cartoon movies while undergoing fMRI. Verbal recall was analyzed with topic modeling to measure content similarity across individuals. Greater similarity in recalled content was associated with stronger shared activation patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) during both encoding and retrieval, particularly in posterior medial, medial prefrontal, and anterior temporal cortices. The findings suggest that natural language processing tools can link memory content to brain activity and that the DMN supports encoding, interpreting, and recalling complex events.

Study at a glance

Abstract

People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are correlated across individuals during shared experiences, suggesting a role in representing high-level event features. However, it remains unclear whether these shared neural patterns reflect similarity in subsequent memory content. Here, we examined whether memory similarity correlates with intersubject spatial patterns in the DMN using a pre-existing dataset. Twenty-four individuals watched and recounted two cartoon movies during fMRI scanning. Using topic modeling, we transformed verbal recall into vectors of latent topics to quantify memory similarity across participants. We found that greater similarity in recalled content was associated with stronger shared activation patterns at encoding and retrieval, particularly in the posterior medial, medial prefrontal and anterior temporal cortices. These findings highlight the utility of natural language processing tools in linking memory representations to brain activity and underscore the DMN's role in encoding, interpreting, and recalling complex event features.