Content Reinstatement

Episodic remembering is fundamentally related to the reinstatement of patterns of neural activity evoked during the initial encoding of memories. This chapter reviews the phenomenon of reinstatement, with a focus on reinstatement of content information (‘what’ is being remembered). It first reviews evidence for, and properties of, content reinstatement across different brain regions (sensory cortex, the hippocampus, fronto-parietal cortex). Next, it considers how reinstatement is related to objective and subjective behavioral measures of memory retrieval, including memory accuracy and memory vividness. Finally, it considers how memory reinstatement influences reinstated memories, separately considering reinstatement that occurs during deliberate retrieval, memory encoding, and during offline periods of rest or sleep.