Formation of conceptual representations in visual processing areas

The presented study investigates the idea of concurrent memory encoding in the hippocampal-neocortical memory network, and specialized subsystems coding for different aspects of the memory. The newly developed paradigm includes two experimental groups that encoded the same abstract visual stimuli during fMRI scanning and were instructed to either remember the detailed item-context combinations (DET) or to identify conceptual categories (CEP). 24h later performance was tested in a categorization and an item-context recognition task, where CEP perform better at categorization and DET at context recognition. The behavioral differences were complemented by differential activation during encoding between the two groups including a stronger increase in visual processing areas over category repetitions in CEP compared to DET which might indicate the formation of conceptual representations