Repulsion of CA3 / dentate gyrus representations is driven by distinct internal beliefs in the face of ambiguous sensory input

Recent human neuroimaging studies of episodic memory have revealed a counterintuitive phenomenon in the hippocampus: when events are highly similar, corresponding hippocampal activity patterns are sometimes less correlated than activity patterns associated with unrelated events. This phenomenon— repulsion— is not accounted for by most theories of the hippocampus, and the conditions that trigger repulsion remain poorly understood. Here, we used a spatial route-learning task and high-resolution fMRI in humans to test whether hippocampal repulsion is fundamentally driven by internal beliefs about the environment. By precisely measuring participants’ internal beliefs and actively manipulating them, we show that repulsion selectively occurred in hippocampal subfields CA3 and dentate gyrus when visual input was ambiguous—or even identical —but internal beliefs were distinct. These findings firmly establish conditions that elicit repulsion and have broad relevance to theories of hippocampal function and to the fields of human episodic memory and rodent spatial navigation.