Kuhl, BriceZhao, Yufei2024-01-092024-01-092024-01-09https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29132While the lateral parietal cortex (LPC) in the human brain is traditionally investigated for its functions in visual perception, more recent evidence has highlighted its substantial contribution to supporting human episodic memory. Early univariate neuroimaging studies suggest that the strength and direction of LPC activation during memory-related tasks is closely related to memory performance. Moreover, recent multivariate fMRI studies show that the neural activity patterns of LPC actively represent mnemonic contents at various granularities. Despite advances in understanding parietal contributions to episodic memory, the relationship between LPC multivariate content representation and univariate activation changes remains unexplored. Moreover, the mechanisms through which the LPC content representation supports episodic memory success are yet unidentified. In the current dissertation, I aim to investigate these topics by incorporating fMRI techniques with neural networks and multivariate pattern analysis methods in a set of two experiments. In chapter II, I demonstrate that repetition-related neural activity differences in the lateral parietal cortex represent stimulus-specific content information, and a greater amount of decodable content information contributes to memory success. In chapter III, I show that content representations in lateral parietal cortex can be adaptively distorted along a feature dimension in order to resolve memory interference, and the degree of such adaptive change contributes to memory success. Together, these studies provide new insights into the nature of content representation in the lateral parietal cortex and how it supports memory success.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Cognitive neuroscienceLateral parietal cortexMemoryElectronic Thesis or Dissertation