Macaque Spatial Sequence Memory Task Courtesy of the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Zhongxin Online Hai, February 11 (Reporter Zheng Yingying) The human brain processes sequence information all the time, athletes must remember the order of the game action, and the lost person must remember a series of directions when asking for directions. How does the brain process this sequence information without confusion? A new study by Chinese scientists is the first to elucidate the principles of computation and coding of sequence information memory at the level of population neurons.
On February 11, Beijing time, the international academic journal Science published relevant papers online. The research was completed by wang liping research group of the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligent Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Min Bin, associate researcher of the Shanghai Brain Science and Brain-like Research Center, and Tang Shiming's research group of the School of Life Sciences of Peking University. Wang Liping group postdoctoral researcher Xie Yang and research assistant Hu Peijue are the co-first authors of the paper.
At the Beijing Winter Olympics, China's Gu Ailing boldly adopted the 1620 difficult moves she had never used in the competition before, and successfully won the gold medal. In an interview after the game, she said that she thought about it in her head during training (1620 movement), never did it on the snow or on the trampoline, and probably did it on the air cushion for a day or two.
In this regard, Wang Liping analyzed that each movement action is equivalent to a point, mapped to a sequence of different time series, forming a unique memory, "first rehearse it in the brain, and then the memory extraction will be smoother." ”
Researcher Wang Liping (right) and Postdoctoral Fellow Xie Yang (left) discuss experimental data Courtesy of the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
In this experiment, the team trained macaques to memorize sequences consisting of multiple location points. In the mission, the screen in front of the macaque flashes 3 points in different positions in turn, and the macaque needs to write down the order in which these taps were presented before a few seconds.
The researchers imaged the prefrontal cortex on the lateral side of the macaque monkeys' brains for two-photon calcium signaling. Data analysis shows that similar to the computer screen that macaques stare at, the neuronal activity of the macaques' brains is also encoded as a "screen", and the macaques can write down the dots that have appeared on this "brain screen", and each sequence of information has its corresponding "screen" in the brain.
The study also found that on the "brain screen" of macaque monkeys, the representation of spatial position is consistent with the ring geometry of real visual stimuli, and the radius size of the ring decreases with the order, possibly because the information in the lower order is allocated less attention resources. This also explains why, in daily life, the more content we remember, the more information we have later, the more likely we are to be wrong. (End)