How sturdy is your memory palace? Reliable room representations predict subsequent reinstatement of placed objects

Our autobiographical experiences typically occur within the context of familiar spatial locations. When we encode these experiences into memory, we can use our spatial map of the world to help organize these memories and later retrieve their episodic details. However, it is still not well understood what psychological and neural factors make spatial contexts an effective scaffold for storing and accessing memories. We hypothesized that spatial locations with distinctive and stable neural representations would best support the encoding and robust reinstatement of new episodic memories. We developed a novel paradigm that allowed us to quantify the within-participant reliability of a spatial context (“room reliability”) prior to memory encoding, which could then be used to predict the degree of successful re-activation of item memories. To do this, we constructed a virtual reality (VR) “memory palace”, a custom-built environment made up of 23 distinct rooms that participants explored using a head-mounted VR display. The day after learning the layout of the environment, participants underwent whole-brain fMRI while being presented with videos of the rooms in the memory palace, allowing us to measure the reliability of the neural activity pattern associated with each room. Participants were taken back to VR and asked to memorize the locations of 23 distinct objects randomly placed within each of the 23 rooms, and then returned to the scanner as they recalled the objects and the rooms in which they appeared. We found that our room reliability measure was predictive of object reinstatement across cortex, and further showed that this was driven not only by the group-level reliability of a room across participants, but also the idiosyncratic reliability of rooms within each participant. Together, these results showcase how the quality of the neural representation of a spatial context can be quantified and used to ‘audit’ its utility as a memory scaffold for future experiences.