Dr. Melanie J. Sekeres, an Associate Professor in Psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, co-authored a significant paper titled "To Update or to Create? The Influence of Novelty and Prior Knowledge on Memory Networks". This paper is one of the 26 contributions to a themed issue in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B issue on ‘Long-term potentiation: 50 years on". The themed issue, published on June 10th, is based on discussions from a Royal Society meeting held in November 2023, reflecting on half a century of research on long-term potentiation and its implications for learning and memory.
The review examines how the brain develops schemas, which are foundational mental structures shaped by experience. Schemas influence behaviour, guide the encoding of new memories and are shaped by associated information. The adaptability of memory schemas facilitates the integration of new information that aligns with existing knowledge structures. They propose how novel information consistent with an existing schema can be swiftly assimilated into existing memory networks when presented. This cognitive updating is facilitated by the interaction between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. However, when novel information is inconsistent with an existing schema, it engages the hippocampus to encode the information as part of a new episodic memory trace. They propose a gradient theory of schema and novelty to elucidate the neural processes by which schema updating or novel memory traces are formed. It is likely that experiences vary along a familiarity–novelty continuum, and the degree to which new experiences are increasingly novel will guide whether memory for new experiences either integrates into an existing schema or prompts the creation of a new cognitive framework.
You can now consult the The main Table of Contents (TOC), and the DOI for the entire issue.