Beyond memory: Hippocampal contributions to social, emotional, and higher-order cognition

The hippocampus is traditionally studied in relation to episodic memory and spatial navigation. Yet its contribution to cognition may extend to how people interpret unfolding situations, represent social relationships, anticipate outcomes, and construct coherent experiences. Research on relational representations, cognitive maps, and hippocampal–cortical interactions offers a basis for connecting these functions with perception, emotion, language, and decision-making. An important question remains: do these diverse contributions reflect shared computations, distinct functional specializations, or different interactions with wider brain networks? Here, “beyond memory” means extending beyond conventional remembering tasks, not assuming independence from memory mechanisms. Addressing this question requires dialogue across research areas that often investigate related processes using different tasks, populations, and explanatory frameworks.This Research Topic aims to clarify how hippocampal mechanisms contribute to social, emotional, and higher-order cognition in humans. We seek work that explains when and how relational binding, contextual integration, cognitive mapping, and predictive inference support flexible behavior. Recent advances in high-resolution neuroimaging, intracranial recordings, naturalistic experiments, and computational modeling provide opportunities to distinguish hippocampal representations from those of interacting cortical and subcortical systems. Particular interest lies in studies that connect mechanisms across cognitive domains, examine subfield or long-axis specialization, or distinguish correlational associations from causal contributions. A complementary clinical strand will consider how altered hippocampal function and connectivity relate to difficulties in perception, social understanding, emotion regulation, and coherent communication. Relevant conditions include psychosis, mood and anxiety disorders, and neurological conditions affecting hippocampal networks. The goal is to identify testable principles linking neural organization to cognition, without presupposing a single explanatory framework or reducing complex symptoms to one brain region.We welcome all articles addressing hippocampal contributions to: social relationships, social inference, and interpersonal interaction; emotional and motivational processing; context-sensitive perception and prediction; language, narrative comprehension, and communication; imagination, future thinking, and decision-making; and changes across development, aging, and clinical conditions. Studies of event segmentation, temporal organization, replay, or memory integration are encouraged when they explicitly connect these processes to broader cognitive functions. Human behavioral studies with a clear neuroscientific rationale, neuroimaging, electrophysiology, lesion research, and biologically grounded computational approaches are within scope. Contributions should specify the hippocampal mechanism or network interaction under investigation and its relevance beyond conventional memory performance. Topic editors: Edward Ruoyang Shi, Elliot Murphy, Lluís Barceló-Coblijn, Aishwarya Balwani Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85947/beyond-memory-hippocampal-contributions-to-social-emotional-and-higher-order-cognition