Using machine learning tools to reveal how memories are coded in the brain

Researchers working in The N.1 Institute for Health at NUS, led by Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from NUS Psychology, and Senior Lecturer Shih-Cheng Yen from the Innovation and Design Programme at NUS Engineering, have discovered that a population of neurons in the brain's frontal lobe contain stable short-term memory information within dynamically-changing neural activity. This discovery may have far-reaching consequences in understanding how organisms have the ability to perform multiple mental operations simultaneously, such as remembering, paying attention and making a decision, using a brain of limited size. The results of this study were published in the journal Nature Communications on 1 November 2019. In the human brain, the frontal lobe plays an important role in processing short-term memories. Short-term memory has a low capacity to retain information.