Neural Reactivation Supports Memory Formation when Events End

Memory routinely transforms continuous experience into discrete episodes that support flexible retrieval. We propose that these structured representations are established via rapid neural reactivation occurring at the completion of an event. A growing body of evidence across tasks and recording modalities shows that event termination elicits rapid reinstatement of recently encoded neural representations. We review findings revealing that end-of-event reactivation is a robust and functionally meaningful phenomenon, describing when it occurs, how it is measured, and which neural signatures characterize it. We propose that neural reactivation at event offsets offers an efficient neural mechanism for stabilizing newly formed traces against interference, binding relational features into a coherent event index, integrating episodes into pre-existing schemas, and preserving temporal continuity across events.