What makes a memory, studies Yale Scientists

Study in US: A study by Yale scientists shed light on what makes a memory. Former Yale graduate students Qi Lin (Psychology) and Zifan Lin (Statistics and Data Science) are co-first authors of the paper.

Yale scientists developed a computational model and behavioural study which suggests a new clue to this age-old question of how our brain prioritizes what to remember.

Ilker Yildirim, an assistant professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior author of the paper said, "The mind prioritizes remembering things that it is not able to explain very well. If a scene is predictable, and not surprising, it might be ignored.”

The study explains it through an example, if a person becomes confused with the presence of a fire hydrant in a remote natural environment and the image will be difficult to interpret, then it will become more memorable.

The researchers developed a computational model that addressed two steps in memory formation — the compression of visual signals and their reconstruction. The study was led by Yildirim and John Lafferty, the John C. Malone Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale.

“Our study explored the question of which visual information is memorable by pairing a computational model of scene complexity with a behavioural study,” said Yildirim.  

John Lafferty who is also the director of the Center for Neurocomputation and Machine Intelligence at the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale said, “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."

Based on the computational model, the researchers designed multiple experiments in which the participants were asked if they remembered specific images from a sequence of natural images shown in rapid succession. They found that the participants remembered the images which were harder for the computational model to reconstruct.

New insights into brain regions involved in paranoia

Yale scientists found what happens in the human brain when people experience paranoia. The study provides a pathway for how to study complex human behaviours in simpler animals. The experiment was conducted on monkeys.

Steve Chang, associate professor of psychology and of neuroscience in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and co-senior author of the study said, “So participants have to figure out what’s the best target, and when there’s a perceived change in the environment, the participant then has to find the new best target."

The approach involved aligning data collected from monkeys with human data — also offers a new cross-species framework through which scientists might better understand human cognition through the study of other species.

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