Neurofunctional underpinnings of individual differences in visual episodic memory performance

Description: Episodic memory, the ability to consciously recollect information along with its context, is an essential component of human cognition. While various fMRI studies have identified brain regions associated with successful memory encoding at the group level, the role of these or other regions in explaining individual differences in memory performance remains largely unexplored. Here, we analyzed fMRI data of 1,498 adults participating in a picture encoding task in a single MRI scanner. We found that individual differences in responsivity of the hippocampus, orbitofrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex accounted for individual variability in episodic memory performance. While these regions also emerged in our group-level analysis, other regions, predominantly within the lateral occipital cortex, were related to successful memory encoding but not to individual variation in memory performance. Furthermore, a network-based approach revealed a link between the responsivity of nine functional connectivity networks and individual differences in episodic memory performance.