The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is well known to be essential for declarative memory. However, a growing body of research suggests that MTL structures might be involved in perceptual processes as well. Our previous modeling work suggests that sensory representations in cortex influence the accuracy of episodic memory retrieved from the MTL. We adopt that model here to show that, conversely, episodic memory can also influence the quality of sensory representations. We model the effect of episodic memory as (a) repeatedly replaying episodes from memory and (b) recombining episode fragments to form novel sequences that are more informative for learning sensory representations than the original episodes. We demonstrate that the performance in visual discrimination tasks is superior when episodic memory is present and that this difference is due to episodic memory driving the learning of a more optimized sensory representation. We conclude that the MTL can, even if it has only a purely mnemonic function, influence perceptual discrimination indirectly.

中文翻译：

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使用情景记忆改善感官表征。

众所周知，内侧颞叶 (MTL) 对陈述性记忆至关重要。然而，越来越多的研究表明 MTL 结构也可能参与感知过程。我们之前的建模工作表明，皮层中的感官表征会影响从 MTL 中检索到的情景记忆的准确性。我们在这里采用该模型来表明，相反，情景记忆也会影响感官表征的质量。我们将情景记忆的影响建模为（a）从记忆中重复重播情节和（b）重新组合情节片段以形成比原始情节更能提供学习感官表征的信息的新序列。我们证明，当存在情景记忆时，视觉辨别任务的表现更好，这种差异是由于情景记忆推动了更优化的感官表征的学习。我们得出结论，即使 MTL 仅具有纯粹的助记功能，它也可以间接影响知觉辨别力。