Memory representations contain conceptual and perceptual information
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Date
2020
Authors
Rennie, Kendrick
Frank, Lea
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Both the parietal and ventral temporal cortices (VTC) have been implicated in representing externally perceived information and information retrieved from memory. However, while the VTC represents visual features of stimuli, it is believed the parietal cortex represents conceptual features. In this study, a pattern classifier was trained on participants’ neural data from VTC or parietal cortex across two tasks (encoding and recall), and we assessed the classifier’s ability to decode category membership of objects and scenes perceived (encoding) or remembered (recall). We predicted that the unique roles of VTC and parietal cortex would translate to differences in which task resulted in highest classification accuracy: we predicted that classification accuracy during perception will be higher in VTC, while recall will be higher in parietal cortex. Our results partially confirmed this hypothesis: although the classifier had higher accuracy when considering perception relative to recall data in both parietal cortex and VTC, the difference in accuracy between perception and recall data was significantly larger when considering VTC neural data. The classification accuracy results suggest that losing perceived information of stimuli from perception to recall has a smaller effect on the classifier’s ability to decode category membership in parietal cortex than in VTC. Thus, neural representations in parietal cortex at encoding may reflect non-visual features (e.g. conceptual information) that are later retrieved.
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Keywords
cognitive neuroscience, psychology, memory, neuroscience, fMRI