Looking at our brain remembering several things at the same time

A new study offers an overview of what is going on in our brain when our working memory must use its limited resources to remember several things.

The researchers discovered that two parts of the brain work together to ensure that more brain resources are given to remember a priority element when a person juggles more than one in memory.

The study concerned people remembering the space locations. Imagine seeing two books on different shelves of a congested library that has not been organized in any order. How could you remember where they were if you came back a few seconds later?

It is the working memory work, which temporarily stores information in your brain for a short period, while you process and decide what to do, said Hsin-Hung Li, the main study of the study and deputy professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

In this study, recently published in the journal Scientific advancesLi and his colleagues observed activity in the brain while people were trying to remember the site of two elements.

“Very often, when you try to remember several things, one can be more important than another,” said Li.

“What we have found is that the most important element is represented in the brain more precisely, while the less important element is given a much lower resolution.”

In the example of the library, you may remember exactly where the most important book was on a specific shelf. But you may only know that the less vital book was somewhere in the upper left corner of the library.

The study involved participants whose brain was scanned in an irmf machine while looking at a screen. We showed them two points, and their goal was to memorize their positions on the screen. Participants were informed that it was more important to remember the location of the point which appeared in an area of ​​the screen – it was the element of high priority.

The two points appeared on the screen simultaneously for half a second. Twelve seconds later, the participants were requested where one of the points appeared. Usually, they were asked where the high priority point had appeared. But around 30% of the time, they were invited to indicate where the low priority point had appeared.

The researchers discovered that they could see the activity in the visual cortex of the brain while the participants were trying to memorize the location of the points, said Li. The dowry of high priority was represented more precisely, while the low priority dowry was represented more roughly, with less resolution.

This brain tactic has worked. Later, when the participants said where they had seen the points on the screen, they placed the point of high priority closer to its real location than with the low priority point.

The researchers have found something else when they analyzed the MIRF scans – the frontal cortex of the brain communicated with the visual cortex, telling him the level of resources that he should allocate to the recall of the location of each point.

“With limited memory resources, the front cortex decided what dowry would get more resources, it would therefore remember more precisely,” said Li.

This observation was important because the neuroscientists had debated what part of the brain – the frontal cortex or the visual cortex – is responsible for working memory involving visual objects, such as the points of this study.

“We found that they both had a role. The visual cortex creates the visual representation of the two points that people were trying to remember,” he said.

“But the frontal cortex makes this allowance decision on which more working memory resources should obtain and which should obtain less.”

Another unique side of this study was the fact that the researchers decoded the brain activity of people looking at two different things both for each test, something that has rarely been done.

“It is a very useful technique, and I think scientists will use it more in the future. There are so many situations in which people try to keep several thoughts in their minds and it is very useful to be able to decode more than one,” said Li.

Li did research at New York University, where he obtained his doctorate. And was a postdoctoral researcher. The other study co-authors were Thomas Sprague, a former postdoctoral scholarship holder of NYU now at the University of California in Santa Barara; And Aspen Yoo, Wei Ji Ma and Clayton Curtis de Nyu.