Memory is typically thought of as enabling reminiscence about past experiences. However, memory also informs and guides processing of future experiences. These two functions of memory are often at odds: Remembering specific experiences from the past requires storing idiosyncratic properties that define particular moments in space and time, but by definition such properties will not be shared with similar situations in the future and thus may not be applicable to future situations. We discovered that, when faced with this conflict, the brain prioritizes prediction over encoding. Behavioral tests of recognition and source recall showed that items allowing for prediction of what will appear next based on learned regularities were less likely to be encoded into memory. Brain imaging revealed that the hippocampus was responsible for this interference between statistical learning and episodic memory. The more that the hippocampus predicted the category of an upcoming item, the worse the current item was encoded. This competition may serve an adaptive purpose, focusing encoding on experiences for which we do not yet have a predictive model.

记忆通常被认为是能够回忆过去的经历。然而，记忆也会通知和指导对未来经历的处理。记忆的这两种功能通常是不一致的：记住过去的特定经历需要存储定义特定时空时刻的特性，但根据定义，这些特性在未来不会与类似情况共享，因此可能不适用到未来的情况。我们发现，当面对这种冲突时，大脑会优先考虑预测而不是编码。识别和来源回忆的行为测试表明，允许根据学习规律预测接下来会出现什么的项目不太可能被编码到记忆中。脑部成像显示，海马体是造成统计学习和情景记忆之间这种干扰的原因。海马体对即将出现的项目的类别预测得越多，当前项目的编码就越差。这种竞争可能具有适应性目的，将编码重点放在我们还没有预测模型的体验上。