Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 487, Issue 3, 10 January 2011, Pages 318-321
Neuroscience Letters

Default mode network gates the retrieval of task-irrelevant incidental memories

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2010.10.047Get rights and content

Abstract

Episodic memories can be retrieved by an intentional search for certain information. Alternatively, a past episode may enter our consciousness without any intention to retrieve it, prompted by a stimulus in our surroundings. Incidental retrieval does not occur upon each encounter with a familiar stimulus, suggesting that a gating mechanism exists which regulates incidental retrieval activity. We analyzed data from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study on incidental retrieval in healthy young adults and found that failure to incidentally retrieve was selectively associated with reduced activation of lateral and medial parietal regions as well as ventromedial frontal cortex, areas implicated in default mode network. This is the first demonstration that relative deactivation of the brain regions associated with the default mode gates the consciousness from currently irrelevant memories.

Research highlights

▶ Deactivation of default mode network prevents task-irrelevant incidental retrieval. ▶ Activation in putamen during trials with incidental retrieval failure. ▶ Intentional retrieval failure not associated with default mode network.

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by a grant from the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences for the Nordic Center of Excellence in Cognitive Control. The author thanks Karolina Kauppi for help in data collection, and Lars Nyberg and René Westerhausen for helpful discussions.

References (20)

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