Remembering what you just saw
New research suggests how visual information can be stored in short term memory
Drop your News-Letter for a minute and take a quick look around. Now pick up your paper again (welcome back!). How much of what you just saw do you remember?
Visual information - and other sensory data - does not disappear from your brain the moment you stop perceiving it. Rather, it remains in your short term memory for some brief period of time.
Although the persistence of visual information in short-term memory has been widely assumed by neuroscientists and psychologists - because otherwise, our daily experience of visual perception simply doesn't make sense - there has actually been very little experimental evidence for it.
Some have argued that the lack of persistence would seem to make perfect sense, considering that an organism's visual world is constantly changing, whether from the movement of the head and eyes or because of actual changes in the environment.
If there were such a visual memory that stayed put for a long time, even for only a second or so, it would be highly detrimental for organisms; one scene would blur into another, making the organism pray for larger, more visually able predators.
But it is in fact just as hard to imagine a world in which images didn't stick around in the brain for at least a little while: This would be a world of jumpy snapshots of the visual world that never coalesce into one coherent image.
Needless to say, an organism without such an ability to store past visual stimuli, at least on a short-term scale, wouldn't survive very long in any environment, either.
Because this sort of short-term visual memory is so vital, it is all the more confusing that, for a long time, no such persistence has been experimentally confirmed in the visual system.
Philip O'Herron and Rudiger von der Heydt of the Kriger Mind/Brain Institute at Hopkins have studied the visual system of macaque monkeys in order to better understand how it is that this short-term persistence hasn't been seen in recordings made in the laboratory.
Visual information - and other sensory data - does not disappear from your brain the moment you stop perceiving it. Rather, it remains in your short term memory for some brief period of time.
Although the persistence of visual information in short-term memory has been widely assumed by neuroscientists and psychologists - because otherwise, our daily experience of visual perception simply doesn't make sense - there has actually been very little experimental evidence for it.
Some have argued that the lack of persistence would seem to make perfect sense, considering that an organism's visual world is constantly changing, whether from the movement of the head and eyes or because of actual changes in the environment.
If there were such a visual memory that stayed put for a long time, even for only a second or so, it would be highly detrimental for organisms; one scene would blur into another, making the organism pray for larger, more visually able predators.
But it is in fact just as hard to imagine a world in which images didn't stick around in the brain for at least a little while: This would be a world of jumpy snapshots of the visual world that never coalesce into one coherent image.
Needless to say, an organism without such an ability to store past visual stimuli, at least on a short-term scale, wouldn't survive very long in any environment, either.
Because this sort of short-term visual memory is so vital, it is all the more confusing that, for a long time, no such persistence has been experimentally confirmed in the visual system.
Philip O'Herron and Rudiger von der Heydt of the Kriger Mind/Brain Institute at Hopkins have studied the visual system of macaque monkeys in order to better understand how it is that this short-term persistence hasn't been seen in recordings made in the laboratory.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Richard Whitney
posted 4/09/09 @ 11:34 PM EST
Prey.
Post a Comment