Replicability of representational similarity and its role in successful memory retrieval

Studies of hippocampal pattern similarity during event encoding and its relationship to subsequent memory retrieval have revealed inconsistent results. Our laboratory recently found evidence that differences in cognitive processing during encoding can modulate the relationship between hippocampal pattern similarity and recognition success. This finding is consistent with the theoretical proposal that hippocampal representations have a dynamic relationship to memory retrieval in which cognitive goals are influential. However, there have been few attempts to replicate representational similarity findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and, to our knowledge, no evidence of successful replication in either the hippocampus or subsequent memory studies. In order to draw strong theoretical conclusions from our findings, or others in the literature, it is important to demonstrate that those findings are robust. The current study attempted a direct replication of our prior experiment with the exception of minor modifications in the neuroimaging parameters, which were intended to assess the degree to which representational similarity analyses are influenced by reasonable technical differences in data collection. We did not replicate the finding that cognitive variability interacts with future recognition success in the hippocampus. Overall, we failed to replicate 9 out of 12 significant F-test results from the Lim et al. study. The three findings that were replicated can be explained by minor visual differences in stimulus presentation on variable cognitive context trials. In addition, we found three new significant effects in the current study that did not previously appear in our earlier study. Therefore, we conclude that fMRI studies using representational similarity analysis of subsequent memory performance are sensitive to minor methodological variation. Further tests of the replicability of these findings are needed prior to drawing theoretical conclusions from their results. Preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/njzhq (date of in-principle acceptance: August 1, 2025) Final recommended Stage 2 manuscript and materials: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZUYNA PCI:RR Stage 1 recommendation: https://rr.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec?id=873 PCI:RR Stage 2 recommendation: https://rr.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec?id=1278.