The brain may have a shared neural system that is involved in the retrieval of facts and personal memories used in everyday life, new research has found.
Factual memory had long been categorised into two stores; factual memory and memory of personal experiences. These two repositories in concert enable people to make sense of the world around them. Individuals with retrograde amnesia can fail to remember personal experiences, but still recall factual knowledge. These two stores have been shown by decades of clinical and experimental research to be stored across two separate regions of the brain.
But the new study suggests that a shared set of brain regions play an important role in controlling the successful retrieval of weak memories.
When participants were asked to retrieve fact memories and personal memories, researchers used functional MRI imaging to study how these regions changed in activity levels.
Lead researcher Dr Deniz Vatansever, formerly of the University of York and now working for the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence, Fudan University said: “The new research suggests that despite their functional differences, successfully retrieving weak information from these two memory systems might be dependent upon a shared brain mechanism.
“Our memories allow us to make sense and flexibly interact with the world around us. Although in most cases, our strongly encoded memories might be sufficient for the task at hand, remembering to pack a beach towel for an upcoming seaside holiday, this strong memory may be irrelevant in other instances, such as when packing for a business trip. As such, we need to tightly control the retrieval of relevant memories to solve different tasks under different circumstances. Our results indicate that this control process might be shared across both factual and personal memory types.”
The researchers said their findings may be applicable to memory disorders, including dementia, where patients’ quality of life is affected by being unable to remember important information. The findings could also be relevant in the development of a new generation of AI, which use long-term memory in solving computational problems.
“In order to generate appropriate thoughts and behaviors, we have to draw on our memory stores in a highly flexible way,” said senior author Elizabeth Jefferies, and professor, Department of Psychology, University of York. “This new study highlights control processes within the brain that allow us to focus on unusual aspects of the meanings of words and to retrieve weakly encoded personal experiences. This control over memory allows us to be creative and to adapt as our goals or circumstances change.”
Source: News-Medical.Net
Journal information: Vatansever, D., et al. (2021) Varying demands for cognitive control reveals shared neural processes supporting semantic and episodic memory retrieval. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22443-2.
