summary: A new study reveals the neural mechanisms behind how we process and remember everyday events.
sauce: WUSTL
A new study by researchers at the University of Washington provides fresh insight into how the brain goes to great lengths to process and remember everyday events.
Zachary Lee, an assistant professor of psychology and brain science at the University of Washington Arts and Sciences in St. Louis, and co-author Charan Ranganath of the University of California, Davis, used a functional MRI scanner to view short videos. We monitored the brains of subjects with Of scenes that could have come from real life. These included men and women working on laptops in cafes, or men and women shopping at grocery stores.
“They were just normal scenes,” Lee said. “No car chases or anything like that.”
Subject immediately described the scene in as much detail as possible. Mundane snippets have led to interesting discoveries, such as how different parts of the brain work together to understand and remember situations.
Networks at the front of the temporal lobe, a region of the brain long known to play an important role in memory, focused on objects regardless of their surroundings. But the posterior-medial networks, which include the parietal lobes towards the back of the brain, paid more attention to the environment.In turn, these networks sent information to the hippocampus, which combined the signals into cohesive scenes. , he explained Regh.
Researchers have previously used very simple objects and scenarios, such as pictures of apples on the beach, to study different components of memory, Regh said. But life is not that simple, he said. “I wondered if anyone had done this kind of research in dynamic real-world situations, and to my surprise, the answer was no.”
A new study shows that the brain creates mental sketches of people that can be moved from one place to another, just as animators can copy characters and paste them into another scene. “It may seem counter-intuitive to be able to create family sketches that your brain travels from place to place, but it’s very efficient,” he said.
Some subjects were able to recall cafe and grocery store scenes more completely and accurately than others. found that they use the same neural patterns when recalling scenes used for
“The more we can bring these patterns back online in describing events, the better our overall memory will be,” he said.
At this time, it is unclear why some people seem more adept than others at recreating the thought patterns necessary to access memories. It’s clear that it could be. “A lot of things can go wrong when you try to get your memory back,” he said.
Even memories that appear vivid and vivid may not actually reflect reality. “I tell my students that your memory is not a video camera. I was.
Reagh is one of the University of Washington faculty members involved in the research cluster “The Storytelling Lab: Bridging Science, Technology, and Creativity”, part of the Incubator for the Interdisciplinary Future. Led by Jeff Sachs, Chair of the Psychology and Brain Sciences Division, the Storytelling Lab explores the psychology and neurology of storytelling with Ian Bogost and Colin Burnett.
In the future, we plan to study brain activity and memory in people watching more complex stories.
“The storytelling lab fits perfectly with the scientific questions that intrigue me the most,” says Regh. “We want to understand how the brain creates and remembers stories.”
About this memory research news
author: Chris Woolston
sauce: WUSTL
contact: Chris Woolston – WUSTL
image: image is public domain
Original research: open access.
“Flexible reuse of cortico-hippocampal representations during encoding and recall of naturalistic eventsby Zachariah M. Reig et al. Nature Communications
overview
Flexible reuse of cortico-hippocampal representations during encoding and recall of naturalistic events
Every life event is unique, but the events have a lot in common. However, little is known about whether or how the brain flexibly represents information about different event components during encoding and memory.
Here, we show that different cortico-hippocampal networks systematically represent specific components of video-depicted events both during online experiences and during episodic memory retrieval.
Areas of the anterior temporal network represented information about people generalized across contexts, and areas of the posterior medial network represented contextual information generalized across people.
The medial prefrontal cortex was generalized across videos representing the same event schema, whereas the hippocampus maintained an event-specific representation. Similar effects were seen in real-time and recall, suggesting reuse of event components across overlapping episodic memories.
Together, these representation profiles provide a computationally optimal strategy for scaffolding the memory of various high-level event components, allowing efficient reuse for event comprehension, recollection, and imagination. will be
