Neural Signatures of Compression in the Retelling of Past Events

When we retell our past experiences, we aim to reproduce some version of the original events; this reproduced version is often temporally compressed relative to the original. How does such compression of memories manifest in brain activity? One possibility is that a compressed retrieved memory manifests as a neural pattern which is more dissimilar to the original, relative to a more detailed or vivid memory. However, we argue that measuring raw dissimilarity alone is insufficient, as it confuses a variety of interesting and uninteresting changes. To address this problem, we examine brain pattern changes that are consistent across people. We show that temporal compression in individuals’ retelling of past events predicts systematic encoding-to-recall transformations in a number of higher associative regions. These findings elucidate how neural representations are not simply reactivated, but can also be transformed due to temporal compression during a universal form of human memory expression: verbal retelling. For associated manuscript pre-print, see https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.21.461232v1.ful