![]() ![]() The subjects were apparently replaying the rewarding memories, strengthening connections and helping to fix the memory in place. ![]() When the researchers looked at brain scans of subjects at rest after giving yes-no answers - neither learning nor actively recalling the memory - they found the same pattern of activity as when subjects were doing the high-reward task. Memory could be biased toward high points of experienceĮven more interesting, participants' memory performance was predicted by brain activity measured during rest. "Also, when an object was associated with high reward, people remembered better the particular background scene that was on the screen during scanning," Gruber said. Afterward, outside of the scanner, there was a surprise memory test for all objects that were shown during scanning.Īlthough participants were not expecting the memory test outside the scanner, they were better at remembering objects that were associated with a high reward, said Gruber, first author of the paper. Once participants completed this part of the experiment, the volunteers were scanned during a resting period. At the end of a series, participants were told how much money they just won. Ranganath and postdoctoral researcher Matthias Gruber put this to the test by scanning the brains of volunteers by functional magnetic resonance imaging as they answered simple yes-no questions on short series of objects - for example, "do these objects weigh more than a basketball?" Each series of objects was shown on a background image for context, and depending on the context, the volunteers were told they would either get a large (dollars) or small (cents) reward for giving correct answers. So if the brain is going to filter information and decide what to remember, it makes sense to save those memories that might be most important for obtaining rewards in the future. People with very detailed memories become overwhelmed with information. It's estimated that we only retain detailed memories for a small proportion of the events of each day, Ranganath said. "The brain prioritizes memories that are going to be useful for future decisions." "Rewards help you remember things, because you want future rewards," said Professor Charan Ranganath, a UC Davis neuroscientist and senior author on the paper.
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