The hippocampus and inferential reasoning: building memories to navigate future decisions

By Dagmar Zeithamova, Margaret L. Schlichting, Alison R. Preston. 2012

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A critical aspect of inferential reasoning is the ability to form relationships between items or events that were not experienced together. This review considers different perspectives on the role of the hippocampus in successful inferential reasoning during both memory encoding and retrieval. Intuitively, inference can be thought of as a logical process by which elements of individual existing memories are retrieved and recombined to answer novel questions. Such flexible retrieval is sub-served by the hippocampus and is thought to require specialized hippocampal encoding mechanisms that discretely code events such that event elements are individually accessible from memory. In addition to retrieval-based inference, recent research has also focused on hippocampal processes that support the combination of information acquired across multiple experiences during encoding. This mechanism suggests that by recalling past events during new experiences, connections can be created between newly formed and existing memories. Such hippocampally mediated memory integration would thus underlie the formation of networks of related memories that extend beyond direct experience to anticipate future judgments about the relationships between items and events. We also discuss integrative encoding in the context of emerging evidence linking the hippocampus to the formation of schemas as well as prospective theories of hippocampal function that suggest memories are actively constructed to anticipate future decisions and actions.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology

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Citations in the corpus

Generalization Through the Recurrent Interaction of Episodic Memories (2012, methodology): “Performance on both these tasks, like transitivity, is disrupted by damage to the hippocampal system across species (Buckmaster et al., 2004; Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996; Coutureau et al., 2002; Myers et al., 2003; for review, see Zeithamova et al., 2012).”
MEMO: A Deep Network for Flexible Combination of Episodic Memories (2020, background): “This ﬂexible recombination of single experiences in novel ways to infer unobserved relationships is called inferential reasoning and is supported by the hippocampus (Zeithamova et al., 2012).”
What Learning Systems do Intelligent Agents Need? Complementary Learning Systems Theory Updated. (2016, unknown): “While encoding-based overlap and retrieval-based models make divergent experimental predictions, empirical evidence to date does not definitely distinguish between them ([4,5,98] for discussion).”
Complementary learning systems within the hippocampus: A neural network modeling approach to reconciling episodic memory with statistical learning (2016, background): “Nevertheless, these paradigms all involve hippocampal processing and, like statistical learning, require integration across experiences (36).”
The hippocampus and related neocortical structures in memory transformation. (2018, background): “C is dependent on the interaction between aHPC and mPFC [36,127].”