To explore this, the experimenters measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants performed visual working memory tasks. However, this only indicates that we do re-code-it doesn’t address how the brain formats working memory representations, which was the focus of the new Neuron study. Rather you store the sounds of the numbers (e.g., what the phone number “867-5309” sounds like as you say it in your head). For instance, when you see a string of digits of a phone number, you don’t store that visual information until you finish dialing the number. 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. “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.Ĭurtis 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. 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.ĭespite its importance, we still know very little about how the brain stores working memory representations. “In this study, we used both experimental and analytical techniques to reveal the format of working memory representations in the brain.” “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, which appears in the journal Neuron. A team of scientists has discovered how working memory is “formatted”-a finding that enhances our understanding of how visual memories are stored.
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