Dominika Varga recently attended the GEM 2025 (Generative Episodic Memory) Conference held from 2–4 June 2025 at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. The event brought together interdisciplinary scientists across neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy  to advance the state of the art in the research on generative episodic memory. https://for2812.rub.de/gem2025/

At the conference, Dominika presented a poster on her research exploring how the hippocampus detects mismatches between expectations and reality. Across three fMRI experiments, she found that mismatch signals are driven by episodic memories rather than generalised knowledge, suggesting the hippocampus compares current input to specific past experiences. Complementary functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRS) data revealed increased glutamate levels prior to hippocampal activation, indicating a link to excitatory processing. The findings challenge broad predictive coding models and support a more memory-specific comparator role for the hippocampus.

Read the preprint of this study here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.04.636427v1
See the poster here: https://e01.eventmemory.org/GEMposter.html