Scientists Unveil How Our Memories Are Stored: The Format of Working Memory
upstart writes:
Scientists Unveil How Our Memories Are Stored: The Format of Working Memory:
A team of scientists has discovered how working memory is "formatted"-a finding that enhances our understanding of how visual memories are stored.
[...] It's been known for decades that we re-code visual information about letters and numbers into phonological or sound-based codes used for verbal working memory. For instance, when you see a string of digits of a phone number, you don't store that visual information until you finish dialing the number. Rather you store the sounds of the numbers (e.g., what the phone number "867-5309" sounds like as you say it in your head). However, this only indicates that we do re-code-it doesn't address how the brain formats working memory representations, which was the focus of the new Neuron study.
To explore this, the experimenters measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants performed visual working memory tasks. On each trial, the participants had to remember, for a few seconds, a briefly presented visual stimulus and then make a memory-based judgment. In some trials, the visual stimulus was a tilted grating and on others it was a cloud of moving dots. After the memory delay, participants had to precisely indicate the exact angle of the grating's tilt or the exact angle of the dot cloud's motion.
Despite the different types of visual stimulation (grating vs. dot motion), they found that the patterns of neural activity in visual cortex and parietal cortex-a part of the brain used in memory processing and storage-were interchangeable during memory. In other words, the pattern trained to predict motion direction could also predict grating orientation-and vice versa.
This finding prompted the question-why were those memory representations interchangeable?
Journal Reference:
Yuna Kwak, Clayton E. Curtis, Unveiling the abstract format of mnemonic representations, Neuron, April 07, 2022 (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.03.016)
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