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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Predictive Latent Simulation as a Memory Retrieval Mechanism

Yunzhe XU¹; ¹Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Presenter: Yunzhe XU

Research on hippocampal sharp-wave ripples (SWR) suggests that memory retrieval and internal simulation are deeply intertwined: prospective sequences emerge during the same neural events that drive memory access, and their content reflects expected future relevance rather than recency. Yet the computational mechanism coupling imagination to retrieval remains underspecified. We propose that imagination-guided retrieval, using internally generated latent simulations as queries against stored experience, offers a parsimonious account of this coupling. We examine navigation agents that use a world model to imagine latent future states that index persistent memory. Perfect-retrieval experiments reveal a consistent ∼20-point performance gap that bounds the headroom attributable to prospective simulation, and multi-agent memory sharing improves navigation in proportion to the agent pool, loosely paralleling hippocampal replay reorganized by social observation. Together, these offer testable predictions for the imagination-retrieval hypothesis.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures