Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The acquisition of new knowledge relies on our ability to connect old information to new information using semanticnetworks. This process can be referred to as memory integration. In this study, we investigated how such integrationmay aid memory reactivation, defined as the retrieval of previously encoded information. In addition, we were interestedin whether congruency (or semantic similarity) between two separately learned associations (AB-AC) enhances memoryintegration. University students learned congruent and incongruent AB-AC associations in an fMRI scanner and reportedsubjective reactivation. In addition to a behavioral score, we measured the degree of neural activity in the PPA to test forpotential effects of reinstatement (neural reactivation) using the multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) technique. Our anal-yses revealed a robust effect of memory reactivation (behaviorally) and reinstatement (neurally). An effect of congruencywas also found behaviorally, but was not evident in the PPA.