How does the brain access stored knowledge? It has been proposed that conceptual search engages neurocognitive processes similar to foraging in physical space. We tested this idea using intracranial E...

The ‘science fiction science’ method simulates future technologies and collects quantitative data on the attitudes and behaviours of participants in various future scenarios, with the aim of predicting impacts of future technologies before they arrive.

Real-world recognition requires our memory system to accommodate perceptual changes that occur after encoding; for example, eyewitnesses must recognize perpetrators across changes in appearance. However, it is not clear how this flexible recognition ability can be improved: Standard encoding strategies not only tend to be ineffective, but can in fact be detrimental for recognizing people across appearance changes. Given the effectiveness of visual imagery in creating and modifying memory representations, we examined whether counterfactual visual imagery could be used to manipulate flexible recognition by simulating an increase in encoding–retrieval similarity. Across two experiments, participants (n = 317) encoded faces with neutral expressions and were cued to imagine the faces with either happy or angry expressions. During later retrieval, participants saw lineups of old and new faces with either happy or angry expressions, and selected the old face and provided recognition confidence. Old/new recognition discriminability and confidence were higher when a face’s expression at retrieval matched the expression that it was imagined in during encoding (i.e., congruent imagery); interestingly, however, there was Bayesian evidence for no benefit of imagery congruence for face-choice accuracy. Moreover, congruent imagery improved recognition for old arrays irrespective of whether participants correctly selected the old face, suggesting that the imagery manipulation influenced a diffuse sense of recognition without influencing the ability to attribute that sense of recognition to a specific stimulus. Together, these findings indicate that visual imagery can directionally manipulate recognition for changed faces and produces a novel dissociation between old/new recognition and forced-choice accuracy.

This is a demonstration of how a single slice of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is collected. Before this makes any sense, you will need to understand…

Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

Several MRI artifacts contribute to the neuronal activity signal picked up by the method, according to a preprint the authors posted this month.

People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are cor...

Increasing working memory (WM) load incurs behavioral costs, and whether the neural constraints on behavioral costs are localized (i.e., emanating from the intraparietal sulcus) or distributed across ...

New tools for literature mining, such as automated analysis of the research literature, are accessible, scalable, and reliable.

Accurate memory formation requires hippocampal spatial representations to balance stability, for later recall, with flexibility, to incorporate new information. The dentate gyrus (DG) is essential to ...

Bluesky posts referencing scholarly articles ‘find substantially higher levels of interaction’ than on Elon Musk’s platform