Huffman Derek J, Stark Craig E L
Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California, Irvine, United States.
Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California, Irvine, United States.
Neuroimage. 2017 Jul 15;155:513-529. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.04.019. Epub 2017 Apr 8.
Since the earliest attempts to characterize the "receptive fields" of neurons, a central aim of many neuroscience experiments is to elucidate the information that is represented in various regions of the brain. Recent studies suggest that, in the service of memory, information is represented in the medial temporal lobe in a conjunctive or associative form with the contextual aspects of the experience being the primary factor or highest level of the conjunctive hierarchy. A critical question is whether the information that has been observed in these studies reflects notions such as a cognitive representation of context or whether the information reflects the low-level sensory differences between stimuli. We performed two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments to address this question and we found that associative representations observed between context and item (and order) in the human brain can be highly influenced by low-level sensory differences between stimuli. Our results place clear constraints on the experimental design of studies that aim to investigate the representation of contexts and items during performance of associative memory tasks. Moreover, our results raise interesting theoretical questions regarding the disambiguation of memory-related representations from processing-related representations.
自从最早尝试描述神经元的“感受野”以来，许多神经科学实验的核心目标是阐明大脑各个区域所代表的信息。最近的研究表明，为了服务于记忆，信息在颞叶内侧以联合或关联的形式被表征，其中经历的情境方面是联合层次结构的主要因素或最高层次。一个关键问题是，这些研究中观察到的信息是反映了诸如情境的认知表征等概念，还是反映了刺激之间的低层次感官差异。我们进行了两项功能磁共振成像实验来解决这个问题，并且我们发现，在人类大脑中，情境与项目（以及顺序）之间观察到的关联表征会受到刺激之间低层次感官差异的高度影响。我们的结果对旨在研究联想记忆任务执行过程中情境和项目表征的研究的实验设计施加了明确的限制。此外，我们的结果提出了关于如何区分与记忆相关的表征和与处理相关的表征的有趣理论问题。
