Summary: New study reveals that people can actively reduce certain information from their memories by dampening the brain circuits that first stored it. In a new study, participants were asked to forget one of two things and afterward tested on the remaining important memories.
Brain scans showed that removing storage material involves reduced irritability in the neural circuits tied to the unnecessary information. These results offer insight into how the mind positively clears space in memory and perhaps help explain how people manage aggressive emotions or dangerous recollections.
Important Information:
- Effective Forgetting: The brain can consciously control memory traces using specific neuronal mechanisms.
- Circuit Deactivation: Forgetting is associated with reduced irritability in brain areas linked to the forgotten product.
- Mental Health Implications: This process may help regulate aggressive ideas, meditation, or illusions.
Origin: SfN
Removing details from reminiscences may help people maintain what they want to consider.
Research focus on how the brain removes knowledge by involuntarily not paying attention to these particulars, but sometimes there is a need to actively replace superfluous details from memories.
This is especially true when details in a memory are perceptibly harmful and lead to, for example, people combating rumination, intrusive negative thoughts, or hallucinations.
In a new Journal of Neuroscience paper, Jiangang Shan and Bradley Postle, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explored how the brain actively removes unneeded memory content.
The researchers recorded the brain activity of nearly 30 study participants as they performed a memory task. In this task, participants were initially given two items to remember.
Experimental conditions either did or did not encourage participants to actively remove the memory of one of these items. Following these conditions, they were given a third item to remember.
Finally, participants were tested on their memory of the relevant first and final items.
The findings indicate a mechanism linked to consciously removing information from a memory: less excitable brain circuits that initially process unneeded memory content.
About this memory and neuroscience research news
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Original Research: Closed access.
“EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory” by Jiangang Shan et al. Journal of Neuroscience
Abstract
EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory
The removal of no-longer-relevant information from visual working memory ( WM ) is important for the functioning of WM, given its severe capacity limitation.
Previously, with an “ABC-retrocuing ” WM task, we have shown that removing information can be accomplished in different ways: by simply withdrawing attention from the newly irrelevant memory item ( IMI; i. e. , via “passive removal” ); or by or “actively ” removing the IMI from WM ( Shan and Postle, 2022 ).
Here, to investigate the neural mechanisms behind active removal, we recorded electroencephalogram ( EEG ) signals from human subjects ( both sexes ) performing the ABC-retrocuing task.
Specifically, we tested the hijacked adaptation model, which posits that active removal is accomplished by a top-down-triggered down-modulation of the gain of perceptual circuits, such that sensory channels tuned to the to-be-removed information become less sensitive.
Behaviorally, analyses revealed that, relative to passive removal, active removal produced a decline in the familiarity landscape centered on the IMI.
Neurally, we focused on two epochs of the task, corresponding to the triggering, and to the consequence, of active removal.
With regard to triggering, we observed a stronger anterior-to-posterior traveling wave for active versus passive removal.
With regard to the consequence( s ) of removal, the response to a task-irrelevant “ping ” was reduced for active removal, as assessed with ERP, suggesting that active removal led to decreased excitability in perceptual circuits centered on the IMI.
