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As we move through the world, what we see is seamlessly integrated with our memory of the broader spatial environment.
How does the brain accomplish this feat? A new study from Dartmouth College reveals that three regions of the brain in the posterior cerebral cortex, which the researchers call "place-memory areas," form a link between the brain's perceptual and memory systems. The findings are published in Nature Communications.
For the study, an innovative methodology was employed. Participants were asked to perceive and recall places that they had been to in the real world during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which produced high-resolution, subject specific maps of brain activity. Past studies on scene perception and memory have often used stimuli that participants knew of but had never visited, like famous landmarks, and have pooled data across many subjects. By mapping the brain activity of individual participants using real-world places that they had been to, researchers were able to untangle the brain's fine-grained organization.
In one experiment, 14 participants provided a list of people that they knew personally and places that they have visited in real-life (e.g., their father or their childhood home). Then, while in the fMRI scanner, the participants imagined that they were seeing those people or visiting those places. Comparing the brain activity between people and places revealed the place-memory areas. Importantly, when the researchers compared these newly identified regions to the brain areas that process visual scenes, the new regions were overlapping but distinct.
"Learning how the mind is organized is at the heart of the quest of understanding what makes us human.
The place-memory network provides a new framework for understanding the neural processes that drive memory-guided visual behaviors, including navigation," explains Robertson.
The research team is currently using virtual reality technology to explore how representations in the place-memory areas evolve as people become more familiar with new environments.
read the original unedited article at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-reveals-memories-familiar-brain.html
read the study paper "A network linking scene perception and spatial memory systems in posterior cerebral cortex" at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22848-z
