Researchers reveal three brain areas that bridge the brain’s perception and memory systems
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.
“As we navigate our surroundings, information enters the visual cortex and somehow ends up as knowledge of where we are – the question is where this transformation into spatial knowledge occurs. We think that the place-memory areas might be where this happens,” explains lead author Adam Steel, a Neukom Fellow with the department of psychology and brain sciences in the Robertson Lab at Dartmouth. “When you look at the location of the brain areas that process visual scenes and those that process spatial memories, these place-memory areas literally form a bridge between the two systems. Each of the brain areas involved in visual processing are paired with a place-memory counterpart.”
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.
