Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Executive functions guide episodic memory to retrieve information essential for adaptive behavior. The prefrontal cortex achieves this by influencing hippocampal processing through anatomical projections targeting the entorhinal cortex and area CA1. However, most computational models of the hippocampus overlook this cognitive control, either neglecting it or implementing implausible direct connections to the hippocampus. This paper explores the contextual control of associative memory implemented by modern Hopfield networks, within a hippocampus-inspired autoencoder. Our experiments underscore the importance of proximity between prefrontal afferences and the locus of memory storage for efficient contextual modulation of episodic memory, challenging the standard model of hippocampal processing. These findings not only advance our understanding of higher-level cognition but also provide design principles for more adaptive machine learning algorithms.