For nearly a decade, a team of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have been seeking to uncover why certain images persist in a people's minds, while many others fade. To do this, they set out to map the spatio-temporal brain dynamics involved in recognizing a visual image. And now for the first time, scientists harnessed the combined strengths of magnetoencephalography (MEG), which captures the timing of brain activity, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which identifies active brain regions, to precisely determine when and where the brain processes a memorable image. Their open-access study, published this month in PLOS Biology, used 78 pairs of images matched for the same concept but differing in their memorability scores ' one was highly memorable and the other was easy to forget. These images were shown to 15 subjects, with scenes of skateboarding, animals in various environments, everyday objects like cups and chairs,...
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