Memory and perception they appear to be distinctly distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to believe that the brain also produced them differently. But in 1990, neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be only involved in sensory perception were also active in memory recall.
“He started asking whether the memory representation is completely different from the sensory representation,” said Sam Ling, associate professor of neuroscience and director of the Visual Neuroscience Lab at Boston University. Could our memory of a beautiful forest pass, for example, be a mere recreation of neural activity that we could see before us?
“The argument turns away from this debate over whether the sensory cortices are even involved to say, ‘Oh wait, what’s the difference?'” said Christopher Baker, a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, who runs the learning and resilience unit. It swings the pendulum from one side to the other. , but twisted further.
Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they cannot be exact. “People don’t get confused between them,” said Serra Favila, a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University and the author of the recent study Nature Communications study His team’s work has identified at least one of the ways in which memories and perceptions of images are assembled differently at the neurological level.
thinking of the blurry pleasure of the day’s delights
When we look at the world, visual information about it flows through the photoreceptors of the retina and into the visual cortex, where it is successively processed in various groups of neurons. Each group adds new levels of complexity to the image: Simple points of light turn into lines and edges, then contours, then figures, then whole scenes that encompass what we have seen.
In a new study, researchers have identified the most important part of the vision process in the first group of neurons: where objects are located in space. The elements and contours of the image need to be in the right places or the brain will get mixed up, creating a recognizable distortion of what we see.
The researchers had expert participants record the positions of four different patterns on a background that resembled a dartboard. Each model is located in a very specific map, and is associated with a color in the middle of the map. Each participant tried to ensure that they remembered this information correctly, if they saw a green dot, for example, they knew that the shape of a star was in the far left position. Then, as the participants perceived and remembered the spatial patterns, the researchers recorded their brain activity.
The brain scan allowed the researchers to describe how the neurons recorded where something was, as well as how they were later remembered. Each neuron attends to a single area, or receptive field, in the expanse of your vision, such as the lower left corner. Neuron “There’s only so much fire when you put something in that little bit,” Favila said. Neurons that tend to converge to a spot in a certain spatial modulation can easily detect their activity in brain scans.
Previous studies of visual perception established that neurons in the early, lower processing areas have small receptive fields, and that in the posterior neurons, the upper ones are larger. In this sense, since they are superior neurons, they combine signals from many lower-order neurons, drawing in information across a wider field of visual field. But a larger receptive field also means lower spatial precision, producing an effect like putting a big blob of ink over North America across a piece of paper to mark New Jersey. In fact, the visual process involves the perception of small rigid dots developed into larger, noisier, but more meaningful blobs.
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