Detecting distributed patterns in an fMRI study of free recall

Conclusions Reinstated activity precedes recall Both theoretical and intuitive accounts of episodic recall focus on the importance of reinstating context. These theories posit that – at study – individual stimuli are associated with more stable, “contextual” aspects of the study episode (relating to general characteristics of items, how they were presented, and how they were processed). At test, subjects use reinstated contextual information to cue for specific studied details. According to this view, retrieval success at test should be a function of how well subjects are able reinstate their neural representation of the study context.