School of Psychology & Centre for Human Brain Health (CHBH), University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF24 4HQ, UK.
Nat Commun. 2019 Jan 14;10(1):179. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-08080-2.
Remembering is a reconstructive process, yet little is known about how the reconstruction of a memory unfolds in time in the human brain. Here, we used reaction times and EEG time-series decoding to test the hypothesis that the information flow is reversed when an event is reconstructed from memory, compared to when the same event is initially being perceived. Across three experiments, we found highly consistent evidence supporting such a reversed stream. When seeing an object, low-level perceptual features were discriminated faster behaviourally, and could be decoded from brain activity earlier, than high-level conceptual features. This pattern reversed during associative memory recall, with reaction times and brain activity patterns now indicating that conceptual information was reconstructed more rapidly than perceptual details. Our findings support a neurobiologically plausible model of human memory, suggesting that memory retrieval is a hierarchical, multi-layered process that prioritises semantically meaningful information over perceptual details.
记忆是一个重建的过程，但人们对于记忆在人类大脑中是如何随着时间重建的知之甚少。在这里，我们使用反应时间和 EEG 时间序列解码来检验以下假设：与最初感知相同事件相比，从记忆中重建事件时，信息流会发生反转。通过三个实验，我们发现了高度一致的证据支持这种反转的信息流。当看到一个物体时，低水平的感知特征在行为上更快地被区分，并且可以更早地从大脑活动中解码出来，而高水平的概念特征则不然。这种模式在联想记忆回忆中发生了反转，反应时间和大脑活动模式现在表明，概念信息的重建速度快于感知细节。我们的发现支持了一个神经生物学上合理的人类记忆模型，表明记忆检索是一个分层的、多层次的过程，优先考虑语义上有意义的信息而不是感知细节。
