We tend to think of memory as something stored away in the brain, ready to be retrieved when we need it. But remembering may be far more dynamic than that.
“Our memory is far from simply a fixed resource that we consult as needed,” Rice University’s Marc Coutanche says. “It’s dynamic and adaptive. Memory retrieval actively updates our memories rather than just ‘playing them back.’”
Coutanche, who recently joined Rice as an associate professor of psychological sciences, and fourth-year doctoral student Amy Qi explored whether the way people access information leaves a trace that can be detected the next time they retrieve it.
Their findings were published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Think about remembering your dog. You might focus on a specific detail, such as the pattern of its fur. Another time, you might simply think of it as a dog. Or you might think about its larger role as part of your family. Coutanche and Qi wanted to know whether those different ways of accessing information could affect what happens in the brain later.
To find out, participants learned pairs of images and unfamiliar Dutch words while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Researchers later prompted them to recall the objects in different ways, focusing on a specific feature, a broader category or a theme.
When participants were tested again, they were about equally good at remembering the information regardless of how they had previously thought about it.
But their brain activity told a different story.
“What I find most interesting is that we showed that a memory seems to carry a trace of how it was used before,” Qi says.
“The neural activity related to the memory not only reflected what participants were doing in the moment but also something about how that memory had been accessed before.”
The researchers found that thinking about objects by category made neural patterns associated with different objects look more alike in areas involved in visual processing. Focusing on an individual object, meanwhile, made its neural pattern more distinct in an area involved in processing words.
The findings add to a growing understanding of memory as something that can change as we use it rather than a fixed record that is simply stored and replayed.
The study also demonstrates how computational tools can reveal aspects of memory that behavior alone may not show.
Coutanche and Qi combined fMRI with machine learning techniques to look for subtle patterns in brain activity. Those methods allowed them to detect how information had previously been accessed in areas including the hippocampus and visual cortex, even though participants performed similarly on the memory tests.
“Without looking at the subtle patterns of activity with techniques like this, we might have missed the findings entirely,” Coutanche says.
“Computational methods like this allow us to detect and understand subtle patterns of activity in a way that gives real insights into how the brain remembers.”
Source: Rice University
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