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Nature Reviews Neuroscience | AOP, published online 10 April 2015; doi:10.1038/nrn3955
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Remembering to forget
The process of remembering can strengthen memories, but it may also suppress unwanted or interfering memories, causing these to be forgotten. There has been no direct evidence of this adaptive inhibition mechanism of forgetting mostly because it is difficult to pinpoint and measure brain activity associated with individual memories. Now, however, Wimber etal. demonstrate a novel functional MRI (fMRI) technique to track the pattern of cortical activation associated with specific memories, and show that competitor memories in the ventral visual cortex (VVC) are actively suppressed by remembering.
First, participants familiarized themselves with 144pictures each of a face, an object or a scene. They then learnt...