It was reported that a team of NUS researchers, led by Assistant Professor Yen Shih-Cheng from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NUS Faculty of Engineering and Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from the Department of Psychology at NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, has recently discovered a mechanism that could explain how the brain retains working memory when faced with distractions. The study conducted by the team suggests that while distractions do change the activity of the neurons, they are able to retain information by reorganising the information within the same population of neurons. In other words, the “code” used by the neurons to maintain memory information morphs to a different code after a distractor is presented. This unexpected finding has strong implications for our understanding of how the brain processes information, which in turn may lead to inspiration for research in artificial intelligence, as well as neuropsychiatric research, where deficits in memory and attention are common. The team’s findings were published online in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Neuroscience on 9 October 2017.
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