Resolving a Seeming Contradiction, Study Advances Understanding of Visual Recognition Memory

Researchers from The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have published a study evaluating how our vision is so good at recognizing what’s familiar. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, overcomes an apparent discrepancy in data to reveal a new insight into how it works.

"Because figuring out what is new and what is familiar in what we see is such a critically important ability for prioritizing our attention, neuroscientists have spent decades trying to figure out how our brains are typically so good at it. Along the way they’ve made key observations that seem outright contradictory," according to an article posted on the Picower Institute website.

The new study seeks to explain how that the measures are really two sides of the same coin, paving the way for an understanding of 'visual recognition memory' (VRM). VRM is the ability to quickly recognize the familiar things in scenes, which can then be de-prioritized so that we can focus on the new things that might be more important in a given moment. 

The findings in the new study, led by former Bear Lab graduate student Dustin Hayden and postdoc Peter Finnie, explain how VEPs increase even amid an overall decline in neural response to familiar stimuli. They also explain more about the mechanisms underlying VRM – the momentary increase of a VEP may be excitation that recruits inhibition, thereby suppressing activity overall.

Read the full Picower Institute article here.