To focus on what’s new, we disregard what’s not. A new study by researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory substantially advances understanding of how a mammalian brain enables this “visual recognition memory.”
Dismissing the things in a scene that have proven to be of no consequence is an essential function because it allows animals and people to quickly recognize the new things that need to be assessed, said Mark Bear, Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and senior author of the study in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“Everyone’s appropriate behavioral response to an unexpected stimulus is to devote attentional resources to that,” Bear said. “Maybe it means danger. Maybe it means food. But if you learn that this once-novel stimulus isn’t anything of significance, it is super adaptive to no longer pay attention to it. It’s absolutely…
