MIT study: Humans able to remember great details for long time

William Atkins
Saturday, 13 September 2008 23:23

Science - Biology

Their paper concludes by saying, “The information capacity of human memory has an important role in cognitive and neural models of memory, recognition, and categorization, because models of these processes implicitly or explicitly make claims about the level of detail stored in memory.”

And, “The upper bound on the size of visual long-term memory has not been reached, even with previous attempts to push the quantity of items …, or the attempt of the present study to push both the quantity and fidelity. Here, we raise only the lower bound of what is possible, by showing that visual long-term memory representations can contain not only gist information but also details sufficient to discriminate between exemplars and states.”

Finally, “We think that examining the fidelity of memory representations is an important addition to existing frameworks of visual long-term memory capacity. Whereas in everyday life we may often fail to encode the details of objects or scenes …, our results suggest that under conditions where we attempt to encode such details, we are capable of succeeding.”

The researchers state that is it important for humans to remember visual information because the evolution of species depend in some part with being able to develop “more complicated cognition and behavioral repertoires involving the gradual enlargement of the long-term memory capacities of the brain.”

In addition, they say the brain’s capacity to store perceptual information may likely be a key factor in the ability to perform abstract reasoning.