Dr. Lewis-Peacock publishes papers in PNAS and Cerebral Cortex
Dr. Jarrod Lewis-Peacock recently published articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Cerebral Cortex.
The paper appearing in PNAS is entitled “Pruning of memories by context-based prediction error”. This work reveals the discovery of an active mechanism for forgetting that weakens memories selectively. Specifically, the work shows that the brain automatically generates predictions about which items should appear in familiar contexts; if these items fail to appear, their memories are weakened. This suggests a process for forgetting of unreliable information that may be adaptive, because such memories may have been encoded incorrectly or may represent unstable aspects of the world.
The paper appearing in Cerebral Cortex is entitled “Neural evidence for the flexible control of mental representations”. This work uses recent advancements in neuroimaging analyses to decode the moment-to-moment information content of the brain and test the neural dynamics underlying the creation of mental representations of visual stimuli, specifically the tendency of humans to recode visual information into a phonologically based verbal representation.