What makes a memory? It may be related to how hard your brain had to work
2024-05-13
(Press-News.org)
New Haven, Conn. — The human brain filters through a flood of experiences to create specific memories. Why do some of the experiences in this deluge of sensory information become “memorable,” while most are discarded by the brain?
A computational model and behavioral study developed by Yale scientists suggests a new clue to this age-old question, they report in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
“The mind prioritizes remembering things that it is not able to explain very well,” said Ilker Yildirim, an assistant professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior author of the paper. “If a scene is predictable, and not surprising, it might be ignored.”
For example, a person may be briefly confused by the presence of a fire hydrant in a remote natural environment, making the image difficult to interpret, and therefore more memorable. “Our study explored the question of which visual information is memorable by pairing a computational model of scene complexity with a behavioral study,” said Yildirim.
For the study, which was led by Yildirim and John Lafferty, the John C. Malone Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale, the researchers developed a computational model that addressed two steps in memory formation — the compression of visual signals and their reconstruction.
Based on this model, they designed a series of experiments in which people were asked if they remembered specific images from a sequence of natural images shown in rapid succession. The Yale team found that the harder it was for the computational model to reconstruct an image, the more likely the image would be remembered by the participants.
“We used an AI model to try to shed light on perception of scenes by people — this understanding could help in the development of more efficient memory systems for AI in the future,” said Lafferty, who is also the director of the Center for Neurocomputation and Machine Intelligence at the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale.
Former Yale graduate students Qi Lin (Psychology) and Zifan Lin (Statistics and Data Science) are co-first authors of the paper.
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2024-05-13
Law enforcement seizures of illicit fentanyl increased dramatically in number and size between 2017 to 2023 in the U.S., especially in pill form, according to a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The number of individual pills containing fentanyl seized by law enforcement was 2,300 times greater in 2023 compared to 2017, with 115,562,603 pills seized in 2023 vs. 49,657 in 2017. The proportion of fentanyl pill seizures to the total number of fentanyl seizures more than quadrupled, ...
2024-05-13
A new interdisciplinary study led by molecular biologist Florian Raible from the Max Perutz Labs at the University of Vienna provides exciting insights into the bristles of the marine annelid worm Platynereis dumerilii. Specialized cells, so-called chaetoblasts, control the formation of the bristles. Their mode of operation is astonishingly similar to that of a technical 3D printer. The project is a collaboration with researchers from the University of Helsinki, Vienna University of Technology and Masaryk University in Brno. The study was recently published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.
Chitin is ...
2024-05-13
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and King’s College London have discovered that how soft or rigid proteins are in certain regions can dictate how fast or slow they enter the nucleus.
Proteins need to come in and out of the nucleus, the control centre of the cell, to give different functions, such as telling the nucleus to switch on or off certain genes. These proteins cross using a channel on the edge of the nucleus called the ‘nuclear pore complex’.
Previous research has shown that the size and composition of these proteins change how easily they can cross, but now this research, published today in Nature Physics, has shown that mechanical properties can also ...
2024-05-13
PRESS RELEASE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
EMBARGOED UNTIL 10:00 LONDON TIME (BST)/ 05:00 US ET ON MONDAY 13 MAY 2024
A copy of the paper and photographs are available at:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Rfv2ywq7jhHLPuhKZ_ihs6TinuLHCJmU?usp=sharing
Peer-reviewed / Meta-analysis / People
A study by the University of Cambridge, UK, and Fudan University, China, has found that a single dose of the measles jab is up to 2.6 times more likely to be completely ineffective in children born by C-section, compared to those born naturally.
Failure of the vaccine means that the child’s immune system does not produce antibodies to fight ...
2024-05-13
In the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) randomized trial, a low-fat diet reduced breast cancer mortality, especially in women with more metabolic syndrome (MetS) components (obesity, high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, and abnormal cholesterol). A recent analysis of WHI findings indicates that MetS and obesity each have different associations with breast cancer subtypes and mortality risk. The findings are published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.
The analysis ...
2024-05-13
The joint research team, led by Dr. Chanwoo Yang and Researcher Seong Ju Park from Korea Institute of Industrial Technology(KITECH), along with Prof. Jin Kon Kim and Dr. Keon-Woo Kim from POSTECH, has successfully developed a compact energy storage device with excellent elasticity. This research was published in the world-renowned journal in the field of electronic engineering, 'npj Flexible Electronics'.
Beyond foldable and rollable devices, the era of stretchable IT devices is arriving. For these devices, the development of small, elastic energy storage devices is essential. In this respect, micro supercapacitors ...
2024-05-13
Many programs ‘deeply entrenched in school culture’ are harmful to children and can cause potentially lasting damage, psychologists have warned.
They say these practices, from abstinence-only sex education to zero tolerance policies, can direct considerable funds away from evidence-based strategies, as well as giving pupils misleading information.
In new book Investigating School Psychology, researchers have carried out an exhaustive review of current literature to look at practices that continue to exist with little to no scientific ...
2024-05-13
The number of cancer cases and deaths in Canada is expected to increase because of a growing and aging population, but the overall rates of people being diagnosed with and dying from cancer will continue to decline, according to the latest cancer trends research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.240095.
The study is the result of a collaboration between the Canadian Cancer Society, Statistics Canada, and the Public Health Agency of Canada. It provides estimates of the number ...
2024-05-13
Prices paid to hospitals during 2022 by employers and private insurers for both inpatient and outpatient services averaged 254% of what Medicare would have paid, with wide variation in prices among states, according to a new RAND report.
Some states (Arkansas, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi) had relative prices under 200% of Medicare, while other states (California, Florida, Georgia, New York, South Carolina, West Virginia, Wisconsin) had relative prices that were above 300% of Medicare.
Even as the number of hospitals and insurance claims analyzed has grown across multiple rounds of the RAND Hospital ...
2024-05-13
Pioneering measures to tackle sedentary behaviour among children in China have proved effective, according to new research.
The study, led by the University of Bristol, reveals regulations recently introduced by the Chinese government to reduce school children’s sedentary behaviour by restricting online gaming companies catering for this age group, limiting the amount of homework schoolteachers can assign, and curtailing when private tuition businesses can provide lessons, significantly reduced total sedentary time as well as how long they spent on different sedentary activities. The measures were associated with a 13.8% daily sedentary drop overall, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] What makes a memory? It may be related to how hard your brain had to work
