近日，英国伦敦大学学院Avital Hahamy等研究人员发现，人脑在自然主义体验的事件边界上重新激活特定环境的过去信息。相关论文于2023年5月29日在线发表在国际学术期刊《自然—神经科学》。

研究人员表明，在理解自然叙事的同时，人类会重新激活过去事件的神经表征。与离线重放类似，这些重新激活发生在海马和默认模式网络中，其中重新激活对相关的过去事件具有选择性。然而，这些重新激活不是发生在长期的脱机期，而是发生在正在进行的叙述事件之间的边界。这些结果在两个数据集上得到了重复，表明重新激活是一种候选机制，将时间上遥远的信息结合到对正在进行的经验的一致理解中。

据介绍，尽管人们以一种连续的方式感知世界，但经验被分割成离散的事件。然而，为了使这些事件有意义，它们必须被缝合到一个总体叙事中，即一个展开的事件的模型。有人提出，当啮齿动物建立空间环境模型时，这种缝合过程发生在离线神经反应中。

附：英文原文

Title: The human brain reactivates context-specific past information at event boundaries of naturalistic experiences

Author: Hahamy, Avital, Dubossarsky, Haim, Behrens, Timothy E. J.

Issue&Volume: 2023-05-29

Abstract: Although we perceive the world in a continuous manner, our experience is partitioned into discrete events. However, to make sense of these events, they must be stitched together into an overarching narrative—a model of unfolding events. It has been proposed that such a stitching process happens in offline neural reactivations when rodents build models of spatial environments. Here we show that, while understanding a natural narrative, humans reactivate neural representations of past events. Similar to offline replay, these reactivations occur in the hippocampus and default mode network, where reactivations are selective to relevant past events. However, these reactivations occur, not during prolonged offline periods, but at the boundaries between ongoing narrative events. These results, replicated across two datasets, suggest reactivations as a candidate mechanism for binding temporally distant information into a coherent understanding of ongoing experience.

DOI: 10.1038/s41593-023-01331-6

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01331-6