Suppose you're preparing dinner and you realize that you'd like to add some more tomatoes, onions, and mushrooms to the salad that you're making. You have no trouble storing images of these items in your head and locating them in the fridge. Suppose instead that you're eating dinner and you decide that you absolutely must have another bottle of red wine for your guests, but you really want the cote du rhone, and not the boring merlot. Again, you can quite easily go and grab the bottle based simply on its label, but in this latter situation, the amount of visual information: the detail that must be stored for comparison upon reaching your liquor cabinet is far greater.
In both cases, you're employing some form of working visual memory. This form of memory is thought to be highly plastic, short-term storage. It is possible however, that it might have different characteristics. The forms that working memory might take are (1) a set of fixed "slots," each having a discreet capacity or (2) a set of dynamic slots which can be more tailored to the specific use.
The fixed-slots concept is similar to the pictures taken by current digital cameras. The images are always the same number of (mega)pixels, no more, no less. While the dynamic-slots concept is more akin to being able to vary the number of pixels in an image depending on demand. For instance, if I was taking a picture of a pure red wall, I wouldn't need any more than 1 pixel because every part of the image would be identical. However, if you were taking a picture of a Jackson Pollack painting, you might want to combine several digital camera images to get a really accurate rendering of the details held therein, a more flexible allocation of working-memory resources.
The scenarios I've highlighted above don't really serve to answer the question of which form of working memory our brains employ because in both cases, we can imagine either form working just fine (as long as we accept the notion that the complexity of the wine bottle label is within the capacity limits of the fixed-slots). However, a recent paper published in Nature claims to have employed a savvy enough experimental approach to disentangle the two possibilities.
The research, published by Steven J. Luck (who has done quite a bit of excellent work in the field of Visual Neuroscience in general) and a colleague, Weiwei Zhang, is sadly quite brief, having clearly been edited for length by the editors at Nature. In fact, this curtailed version is quite difficult to follow, given the subtlety of the approach that the authors used, but their essential point comes through.
The approach they take is a common one. They measure human performance on a variety of working-memory tasks and attempt to fit these data to models with different assumptions. In this paper, they compare how well the data can be fit to a fixed-slots model versus a dynamic-slots model. Although they conclude that the dynamic-slots model simply doesn't explain the data as well, and they thus discard the notion of flexible resource allocation, one of the final sentences betrays what they must admit: "This model does not completely eliminate the concept of resources, because the slots themselves are a type of resource." In other words, it is possible to allocate multiple slots to the same item object-to-be-held-in-memory. However, it does appear that the slots themselves are of a fixed size.
This result places limits on the possible anatomical underpinnings of working-memory, and makes predictions about how one might expect human beings to perform in other, working-memory tasks. It will be interesting to see if the conclusions that these authors reached will be borne out in future work.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
On Male Versus Female (bugs)
Male fruitflies know what their ladies like. They court them with the dulcet tones of their wings themselves. It has been observed that one behavior that males of the species Drosophila Melanogaster can engage in that appears to increase his likelyhood of copulating with a female, is the rhythmic production of sound by wing-vibration; that is if she finds his performance to be sufficiently virtuosic. This behavior is controlled by a central pattern generator (CPG), a group of neurons that, more or less, independently generates the activity corresponding to this motion. Think of this as a sort of reflex, somewhat akin to walking at a constant pace over a completely flat surface in that it is extremely stereotyped and largely automatic.
Nature Magazine
One question this has raised in researchers minds is why this behavior is limited to males. A new study demonstrates that the females have this ability, but they simply suppress it. Apparently the neurons that kickstart the motor of the central pattern generator are simply not active in females. In order to get these cells going, Jai Y. Yu and Barry J. Dickson used a technique involving the manipulation of ion channels with light.
Every neuron's excitability is mediated by the opening and closing of small pores (ion channels) in their membranes which allow charged ions to flow in and out. The regulation of this permeability or conductivity of the membrane determines how excited the neuron can become. Put another way, if a bunch of little doors burst open that allow positively charged ions to flow into the cell, those ions flood in, raising the voltage of the cell, putting it in an excited state. It turns out that certain species of algae have specialized ion channels that are of some use to scientists. Usually ion channels are opened in response to neurotransmitter or enzymatic signals, but these plants have ion channels that are directly "gated" (opened or closed) by impinging light. What Yo & Dickson have done is to exploit a technique in which they borrow these channels and put them into specific cells using molecular genetic techniques, thus allowing them to selectively excite specific ion channels in specific neurons with bursts of luminance.
In this way, they were able to observe that, through the excitation of neurons controlling the CPG, the ladies are able to produce these courtship songs as well, they just didn't know they had it in them.
One question this has raised in researchers minds is why this behavior is limited to males. A new study demonstrates that the females have this ability, but they simply suppress it. Apparently the neurons that kickstart the motor of the central pattern generator are simply not active in females. In order to get these cells going, Jai Y. Yu and Barry J. Dickson used a technique involving the manipulation of ion channels with light.
Every neuron's excitability is mediated by the opening and closing of small pores (ion channels) in their membranes which allow charged ions to flow in and out. The regulation of this permeability or conductivity of the membrane determines how excited the neuron can become. Put another way, if a bunch of little doors burst open that allow positively charged ions to flow into the cell, those ions flood in, raising the voltage of the cell, putting it in an excited state. It turns out that certain species of algae have specialized ion channels that are of some use to scientists. Usually ion channels are opened in response to neurotransmitter or enzymatic signals, but these plants have ion channels that are directly "gated" (opened or closed) by impinging light. What Yo & Dickson have done is to exploit a technique in which they borrow these channels and put them into specific cells using molecular genetic techniques, thus allowing them to selectively excite specific ion channels in specific neurons with bursts of luminance.
In this way, they were able to observe that, through the excitation of neurons controlling the CPG, the ladies are able to produce these courtship songs as well, they just didn't know they had it in them.
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