The human brain regions responsible for working memory content are also used to gauge the quality, or uncertainty, of memories, a team of scientists has found. Its study uncovers how these neural responses allow us to act and make decisions based on how sure we are about our memories.
“Access to the uncertainty in our working memory enables us to determine how much to ‘trust’ our memory in making decisions,” explains Hsin-Hung Li, a postdoctoral fellow in New York University’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal Neuron. “Our research is the first to reveal that the neural populations that encode the content of working memory also represent the uncertainty of memory.”
Working memory, which enables us to maintain information in our minds, is an essential cognitive system that is involved in almost every…
