ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Prediction errors disrupt hippocampal representations and update episodic memories.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Imagine yourself as a little girl…-efficacy and psychophysiology of imagery techniques targeting adverse autobiographical childhood experiences- multi-arm randomised controlled trial.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Trial
- Learning from mistakes: Objective and subjective error magnitudes predict the testing effect.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Reward Prediction Errors Drive Reinforcement Learning and Recognition Memory: Gender Differences in Methamphetamine Abusers.Brain and behavior · 2026Article
- Competing speech streams are simultaneously represented in the human cortex during attention switching.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- A dynamic affective surprise signal influences episodic memory.Cognition · 2026Article
- Empathy-Mediated Narrative Reconstruction of Autobiographical Memory: An Integrative Review of Theory, Evidence, and Applications.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Distinct Hippocampal Mechanisms Support Concept Formation and Updating.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Action or Stimulus: Individual Beliefs About Learned Associations Influence the Processing of Immediate and Delayed Feedback.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Learning from imagined experiences via an endogenous prediction error.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Prediction error is out of context: The dominance of contextual stability in structuring episodic memories.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Complementary roles of dorsal and ventral hippocampus in the flexible adaptation of goal-directed behavior.Science advances · 2025Article
- Neural Representation of Episodic Time.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Spontaneous fluctuations in global connectivity reflect transitions between states of high and low prediction error.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Targeting memory of embedded positive verbal content indirectly modulates negative visual memory.iScience · 2025Article
- Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Prediction Error-Related Memory Enhancement Depends on the Neural State Surrounding the Prediction Error Event.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Prediction error and memory updating: Challenges ahead.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Article
- Not the same as it ever was: A review of memory modification, updating, and distortion in humans and rodents.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
- Insight predicts subsequent memory via cortical representational change and hippocampal activity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Prediction of information value influences memory: the effect of predicted and assigned value on memory.Memory (Hove, England) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The brain supports adaptive behavior by generating predictions, learning from errors, and updating memories to incorporate new information. Prediction error, or surprise, triggers learning when reality contradicts expectations. Prior studies have shown that the hippocampus signals prediction errors, but the hypothesized link to memory updating has not been demonstrated. In a human functional MRI study, we elicited mnemonic prediction errors by interrupting familiar narrative videos immediately before the expected endings. We found that prediction errors reversed the relationship between univariate hippocampal activation and memory: greater hippocampal activation predicted memory preservation after expected endings, but memory updating after surprising endings. In contrast to previous studies, we show that univariate activation was insufficient for understanding hippocampal prediction error signals. We explain this surprising finding by tracking both the evolution of hippocampal activation patterns and the connectivity between the hippocampus and neuromodulatory regions. We found that hippocampal activation patterns stabilized as each narrative episode unfolded, suggesting sustained episodic representations. Prediction errors disrupted these sustained representations and the degree of disruption predicted memory updating. The relationship between hippocampal activation and subsequent memory depended on concurrent basal forebrain activation, supporting the idea that cholinergic modulation regulates attention and memory. We conclude that prediction errors create conditions that favor memory updating, prompting the hippocampus to abandon ongoing predictions and make memories malleable.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.