Tag : Memory

Washington: A team of scientists has discovered how working memory is 'formatted', a finding that enhances our understanding of how visual memories are stored. The findings of the study were published in the journal Neuron. "For decades researchers have wondered about the nature of the neural representations that support our working memory," explains Clayton Curtis, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and the senior author of the paper. "In this study, we used both experimental and analytical techniques to reveal the format of working memory representations in the brain." The ability to store information for brief periods of time, or "working memory," is a building block for most of our higher cognitive processes, and its dysfunction is at the heart of a variety of psychiatric and neurologic symptoms, including schizophrenia. Despite its importance, we still know very little about how the brain stores working memory representations. "Although we can predict the contents of your working memory from the patterns of brain activity, what exactly these patterns are coding for has remained impenetrable," Curtis states. Curtis and co-author Yuna Kwak, an NYU doctoral student, hypothesized that our brains not only discard task-irrelevant features but also re-code task-relevant features into memory formats that are both efficient and distinct from the perceptual inputs themselves. 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 dialling the number. Rather you store the sounds o ...