The representation of social interaction in episodic memory: A functional MRI study

The representation of social interaction in episodic memory is a critical factor for the successful navigation of social relationships. In general, it is important to separate episodic memory during social interaction from episodic memory during the self-generation of action events. Different cortical representations have been associated with social interaction vs. self-generated episodic memory. Here we clarified the cortical representation of the effect of context (social vs. solitary) on episodic memory by comparing it with the generation effect (self vs. other) on episodic memory. Each participant learned words while engaged in a sentence generation and a reading task, and subsequently each participant was scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed a recognition task using the words that had been learned. The experiment was comprised of four conditions and we looked at two situations that involved a social context and non-social (solitary) context task. In the learning session before entering the MRI, two participants collaborated in a social context either generating (social–contextual self-generation condition: SS) or reading (social–contextual other-generation condition: SO) a sequence of sentences alternately to construct a meaningful story narrative. In the non-social context, the participants generated (non-social–contextual self-generation condition: NS) or read (non-social–contextual other-generation condition: NO) a sequence of sentences individually. The stimuli for the recognition session consisted of learned words and novel words. Activation for social context retrieval was identified in the right medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and activation for self-generated retrieval was identified in the left mPFC and the left middle cingulate cortex. These results indicate that dissociable regions within the medial prefrontal cortices contribute to the processes involved in the representation of social interaction, including social context and self-generation in the retrieval of episodic memory. ► Representation of social interaction is a critical factor for social relationships. ► The right mPFC constitutes the neural basis of social context in episodic memory. ► The left mPFC constitutes the neural basis of self-generation in episodic memory.