Long term fMRI adaptation depends on adapter response in face-selective cortex

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Neuroimaging
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Repetition suppression (RS) is a neural phenomenon characterized by reduced brain activity upon repeated stimulus exposure.
• The predictive coding hypothesis suggests RS arises from prediction errors during perception.
• Investigating RS within category-selective brain regions offers insights into memory formation and neural processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the predictive coding hypothesis for RS in visual memory.
• To examine the interaction between RS and subsequent memory performance in category-selective cortex.
• To differentiate between absolute and relative RS in relation to memory and neural responses.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed.
• A subsequent memory paradigm with face and house stimuli was used.
• Linear Mixed Model analyses assessed repetition, recognition memory, and their interactions.

Main Results:

• Absolute RS during encoding interacted with subsequent remembrance probability in the face-selective cortex (FFA).
• This interaction was not observed for relative RS, indicating the importance of raw neural attenuation.
• An association between adapter response and RS was found for both short and long-term memory intervals.

Conclusions:

• The findings challenge the predictive coding framework for visual memory.
• Results are more consistent with adapter-related and familiarity-based accounts of neural processing.
• RS in face-selective regions is linked to memory predictability, supporting alternative theoretical models.