Saturday, October 21, 2006

Binding information about items and their contexts

So we know frequency has bearing on how the brain works during semantic judgments, encoding, and retrieval. Now, we take a look more specifically at how the brain does the work of binding the item to information about its occurrence for subsequent memory. Previously, we showed that if you had to engage the brain more during encoding, you are more likely to remember the item's occurrence. Now, we are interested in where in the brain this occurrence information or contextual information about the item is processed.

We looked at pictures for this inquiry instead of words because they afforded more relevant ways of manipulating the stimuli, as well as the ability to test these items more easily in other sample groups of people as will become apparent later on.

When looking at pictures of objects in background scenes, we are able to process information about the identity of the object, the content or spatial layout of the background. Furthermore, we form the binding between object and background that relates to information about their co-occurrence. The brain regions involved in these respective processes are the lateral occipital complex (LOC), the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and the medial temporal regions (MTL) that includes a different region of the parahippocampal gyrus and the hippocampus. Abstract: Cortical areas involved in object, background, and object-background processing revealed with functional magnetic resonance adaptation.

Thus, we know that the brain processes the component item information and their contextual binding in seperate regions. These then give us clues about how these different regions might operate differently across people groups that show different memory behavior and/or processing of visual stimuli.

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