Submitted by Administrator on Tue, 25/10/2016 - 10:31
Researchers from the Department's Memory Laboratory have discovered that different regions within the brain's core memory network are responsible for the success, precision, and vividness with which we remember our past experiences.
The new research, published today in the journal eLife, was jointly led by Franka Richter and Rose Cooper, and resolves a limitation in previous work that identified a network of brain regions typically engaged when people perform memory tasks. Usually, the whole network is recruited together, which has made it difficult to determine specific roles of individual regions within the network.
The research team, which also included Paul Bays and senior author Jon Simons, developed a novel memory task to try to tease apart different aspects of remembering which involved studying visual displays and subsequently using a continuous dial to recreate their different features. For example, a picture of some pliers might be studied in a random location, orientation and colour on top of a visual scene. During retrieval, participants would try to remember the pliers' appearance by using the continuous dial to move the pliers to the location in which they were studied, rotate them to the studied orientation, and vary their colour until it matched the studied colour. Participants also rated how vividly they remembered each scene.
The researchers found that retrieval success, precision, and vividness could be separated from each another using our task. When they analysed the brain imaging data, distinct regions within the core memory network responded to each different aspect of memory: the hippocampus, a brain region known to be important for healthy memory function, signalled whether or not information was remembered. The precuneus, an area related to imagining, responded to how vividly participants rated their memories. Lastly, a region called the angular gyrus responded to how precisely information was remembered.
Reference:
Richter, F.R.*, Cooper, R.A.*, Bays, P., & Simons, J.S. (2016). Distinct neural mechanisms underlie the success, precision, and vividness of episodic memory. eLife, 5, e18260.
A blog post written by the authors can be found here