How do people learn new facts?
The quality of activity in distinct brain areas during learning can predict whether people successfully acquire knowledge about places and characters in fictional civilizations.
While studies have linked brain areas to remembering personal experiences, brain areas involved in learning more impersonal information about the world remain unclear. In a new JNeurosci paper, Scott Fairhall and colleagues, from the University of Trento, used fMRI on 29 human volunteers as they performed a learning task to shed light on how the brain acquires semantic, impersonal information.
In the task, participants learned 120 fictitious facts about three imaginary civilizations based off fantasy works, like Game of Thrones. Nearly 2 d later, researchers assessed which facts people recalled better than others during a memory test. Brain imaging pointed to activity from distinct regions that were sensitive to semantic information about places and people during learning. The quality of activity in two of these regions, representing the strength of the information about places and people, could even predict whether people recalled the information during the memory task.
Says Fairhill, “These findings suggest that the mechanism for learning new facts about the world is partially distinct from the previously well-characterized brain mechanisms for remembering things that happen in our lives, which depends on different structures.”
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About JNeurosci
JNeurosci was launched in 1981 as a means to communicate the findings of the highest quality neuroscience research to the growing field. Today, the journal remains committed to publishing cutting-edge neuroscience that will have an immediate and lasting scientific impact, while responding to authors' changing publishing needs, representing breadth of the field and diversity in authorship.
About The Society for Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 35,000 members in more than 95 countries.
Journal
JNeurosci
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Semantic Representational Strength in the Precuneus and Lateral ATL Predicts Successful Factual Learning
Article Publication Date
20-Oct-2025
Exploring how storytelling strategies shape memories
When people recall events from a story detailed with personal interpretations or emotions, this triggers different memory mechanisms than when they recall the same story that instead emphasized external, more concrete, elaborative details.
Society for Neuroscience
image:
This image depicts different “Taking a Flight” narrative stimuli used in an experiment. While central details were consistent, peripheral elaborations were different. Conceptual versus perceptual elaborations trigger different memory recall mechanisms later.
view moreCredit: Ferri et al. JNeurosci 2025.
Does the way a person hears about an event shape their recollection of it later? In a new JNeurosci paper, Signy Sheldon and colleagues, from McGill University, explored whether different storytelling strategies affect how the brain stores that experience as a memory and recalls it later.
The researchers created narratives with the same core events, but different elaborative details. These elaborations had two different focuses: (1) conceptual details, which describe a person’s feelings and interpretations while experiencing core events, and (2) perceptual details, such as a person’s concrete observations about core events. Neuroimaging revealed that when the 35 study participants remembered the stories later, different memory networks in the brain were involved. Notably, the distinct conceptual and perceptual brain networks that were active while listening to these different types of stories could predict how well participants later recalled the core elements of the story.
This study suggests that how people hear about an event shapes the way their brain makes a memory of that experience. Sheldon elaborates on what this could mean: “There is a lot of work in the field to show that individuals and groups prefer different memory systems. For example, older adults tend to engage the conceptual memory system more than younger adults, who prefer to engage the perceptual memory system when experiencing an event. This would mean that older adults may process events described with conceptual details better than younger adults. If this is the case, this could help us tailor information to different age groups to improve memory. This is something we are hoping to test in the future.”
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Please contact media@sfn.org for full-text PDF.
About JNeurosci
JNeurosci was launched in 1981 as a means to communicate the findings of the highest quality neuroscience research to the growing field. Today, the journal remains committed to publishing cutting-edge neuroscience that will have an immediate and lasting scientific impact, while responding to authors' changing publishing needs, representing breadth of the field and diversity in authorship.
About The Society for Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 35,000 members in more than 95 countries.
Journal
JNeurosci
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Hippocampal–Cortical Networks Predict Conceptual Versus Perceptually Guided Narrative Memory
Article Publication Date
20-Oct-2025
