New Paper in Cerebral Cortex!

Dr. Bainbridge, along with her collaborators Elizabeth Hall and Dr. Chris Baker, has published “Distinct Representational Structure and Localization for Visual Encoding and Recall during Visual Imagery” in Cerebral Cortex. In this paper, they demonstrate that visual recall, although commonly thought to be a reactivation of encoding patterns, actually has different representational structure and location. Using an item-based visual recall task in a 7T-fMRI scanner, they compared encoding and recall along a spectrum of information granularity: coarse (scenes, objects), mid (e.g. natural, manmade scenes), and fine (e.g. living room, cupcake). While encoding representations contain decodable information at all levels of granularity, recall representations primarily contained coarse-level information, with fine-level information in some areas.  Additionally, decoding of recalled content shows an anterior shift in the brain compared to encoding.