remember when i took that home winemaking course

How many participants did Maria Wimber study?

In this latest study, Maria Wimber and her colleagues recruited 24 healthy participants and trained them on a visual memory task in which they were shown a series of words, each associate with a pair of images. For example, the word ‘sand’ was shown with an image of Marilyn Monroe and then one of a hat. The researchers then scanned the participants’ brains while they performed a selective retrieval task, in which they saw some of the words again, and had to indicate the first image they associated with it.

Why did the researchers want to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and?

The researchers wanted to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and those they had not. They assumed that seeing each of the ‘cue’ words again would reactivate activity patterns for both of the associated images, and predicted that recalling one image would engage inhibitory mechanisms that actively diminish the memory of the other, competing image.

Why do we forget?

We knew, from earlier work, that remembering can cause forgetting, and this is thought to occur because of an inhibitory signal from the frontal cortex that suppresses similar memories and prevents them from interfering with retrieval. Until now, though, evidence for this has been hard to come by, one reason being that it is difficult to distinguish between the brain activity patterns associated with related memories using fMRI.