Summary

Memory refers to the set of cognitive systems and the neural structures that support them that allow humans to learn from experience, leverage this knowledge to understand and guide behavior in the present, and use past memories to think about and plan for the future. Neuroscience research on learning and memory has leveraged advances in behavioral methods, structural and functional brain imaging, noninvasive brain stimulation, and lesion studies to evaluate synergies and dissociations among small- and large-scale neural networks in support of memory performance. Overall, this work has converged to a conceptualization of new memories as representations of distributed patterns of neural activity across cortical and subcortical brain systems that provide neural grounding of sensorimotor and perceptual experiences, actions, thoughts, and emotions, and which can be reinstated as a result of internal or external cues.

Most of this literature has supported dissociations among working and long-term memory, as well as between procedural, episodic, and semantic memories. On the other hand, progress in human neuroscience methodologies has revealed the interdependence of these memory systems in the context of complex cognitive tasks and suggests a dynamic and highly interactive neural architecture underlying human learning and memory. Future neuroscience research is anticipated to focus on understanding the neural mechanisms supporting this interactivity at the cellular and systems levels, as well as investigating the time course of their engagement.