Behavioral and neuroscience studies have shown that we can easily identify material categories, such as metal and fabric. Not only the early visual areas but also higher-order visual areas including the fusiform gyrus are known to be engaged in material perception. However, the brain mechanisms underlying visual short-term memory (VSTM) for material categories are unknown. To address this issue, we examined the neural correlates of VSTM for objects with material categories using a change detection task. In each trial, participants viewed a sample display containing two, four, or six objects having six material categories and were required to remember the locations and types of objects. After a brief delay, participants were asked to detect an object change based on the images or material categories in the test display (image-based and material-based conditions). Neuronal activity in the brain was assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Behavioral results showed that the number of objects encoded did not increase as a function of set size in either image-based or material-based conditions. By contrast, MRI data showed a difference between the image-based and material-based conditions in percent signal change observed in a priori region of interest, the fusiform face area (FFA). Thus, we failed to achieve our research aim. However, the brain activation in the FFA correlated with the activation in the precentral/postcentral gyrus, which is related to haptic processing. Our findings indicate that the FFA may be involved in VSTM for objects with material categories in terms of the difference between images and material categories and that this memory may be mediated by the tactile properties of objects.

Active recall of short-term memory (STM) is known to last for a few hours, but whether STM has long-term functions is unknown. Here we show that STM can be optogenetically retrieved at a time point during which natural recall is not possible, uncovering the long-term existence of an STM engram. Moreover, re-training within 3 days led to natural long-term recall, indicating facilitated consolidation. Inhibiting offline CA1 activity during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) activity, or protein synthesis after first exposure to the STM-forming event impaired the future re-exposure-facilitated consolidation, which highlights a role of protein synthesis, NMDAR and NREM sleep in the long-term storage of an STM trace. These results provide evidence that STM is not completely lost within hours and demonstrates a possible two-step STM consolidation, first long-term storage as a behaviorally inactive engram, then transformation into an active state by recurrence within 3 days.

Visual attention is strongly affected by the past: both by recent experience and by long-term regularities in the environment that are encoded in and retrieved from memory. In visual search, intertrial repetition of targets causes speeded response times (short-term priming). Similarly, targets that are presented more often than others may facilitate search, even long after it is no longer present (long-term priming). In this study, we investigate whether such short-term priming and long-term priming depend on dissociable mechanisms. By recording eye movements while participants searched for one of two conjunction targets, we explored at what stages of visual search different forms of priming manifest. We found both long- and short- term priming effects. Long-term priming persisted long after the bias was present, and was again found even in participants who were unaware of a color bias. Short- and long-term priming affected the same stage of the task; both biased eye movements towards targets with the primed color, already starting with the first eye movement. Neither form of priming affected the response phase of a trial, but response repetition did. The results strongly suggest that both long- and short-term memory can implicitly modulate feedforward visual processing.

Drug-drug interaction extraction (DDI) needs assistance from automated methods to address the explosively increasing biomedical texts. In recent years, deep neural network based models have been developed to address such needs and they have made significant progress in relation identification.

This study determined whether the kinematics of lower limb trajectories during walking could be extrapolated using long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. It was hypothesised that LSTM auto encoders could reliably forecast multiple time-step trajectories of the lower limb kinematics, specifically linear acceleration (LA) and angular velocity (AV). Using 3D motion capture, lower limb position-time coordinates were sampled (100 Hz) from six male participants (age 22 ± 2 years, height 1.77 ± 0.02 m, body mass 82 ± 4 kg) who walked for 10 min at 5 km/h on a 0% gradient motor-driven treadmill. These data were fed into an LSTM model with a sliding window of four kinematic variables with 25 samples or time steps: LA and AV for thigh and shank. The LSTM was tested to forecast five samples (i.e., time steps) of the four kinematic input variables. To attain generalisation, the model was trained on a dataset of 2,665 strides from five participants and evaluated on a test set of 1 stride from a sixth participant. The LSTM model learned the lower limb kinematic trajectories using the training samples and tested for generalisation across participants. The forecasting horizon suggested higher model reliability in predicting earlier future trajectories. The mean absolute error (MAE) was evaluated on each variable across the single tested stride, and for the five-sample forecast, it obtained 0.047 m/s2 thigh LA, 0.047 m/s2 shank LA, 0.028 deg/s thigh AV and 0.024 deg/s shank AV. All predicted trajectories were highly correlated with the measured trajectories, with correlation coefficients greater than 0.98. The motion prediction model may have a wide range of applications, such as mitigating the risk of falls or balance loss and improving the human-machine interface for wearable assistive devices.

Recent works shed light on the neural correlates of true and false recognition and the influence of time of day on cognitive performance. The current study aimed to investigate the modulation of the false memory formation by the time of day using a non-linear correlation analysis originally designed for fMRI resting-state data. Fifty-four young and healthy participants (32 females, mean age: 24.17 ± 3.56 y.o.) performed in MR scanner the modified Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm in short-term memory during one session in the morning and another in the evening. Subjects' responses were modeled with a general linear model, which includes as a predictor the non-linear correlations of regional BOLD activity with the stimuli, separately for encoding and retrieval phases. The results show the dependence of the non-linear correlations measures with the time of day and the type of the probe. In addition, the results indicate differences in the correlations measures with hippocampal regions between positive and lure probes. Besides confirming previous results on the influence of time-of-day on cognitive performance, the study demonstrates the effectiveness of the non-linear correlation analysis method for the characterization of fMRI task paradigms.

Chromatin landscapes are disrupted during DNA replication and must be restored faithfully to maintain genome regulation and cell identity. The histone H3-H4 modification landscape is restored by parental histone recycling and modification of new histones. How DNA replication impacts on histone H2A-H2B is currently unknown. Here, we measure H2A-H2B modifications and H2A.Z during DNA replication and across the cell cycle using quantitative genomics. We show that H2AK119ub1, H2BK120ub1, and H2A.Z are recycled accurately during DNA replication. Modified H2A-H2B are segregated symmetrically to daughter strands via POLA1 on the lagging strand, but independent of H3-H4 recycling. Post-replication, H2A-H2B modification and variant landscapes are quickly restored, and H2AK119ub1 guides accurate restoration of H3K27me3. This work reveals epigenetic transmission of parental H2A-H2B during DNA replication and identifies cross talk between H3-H4 and H2A-H2B modifications in epigenome propagation. We propose that rapid short-term memory of recycled H2A-H2B modifications facilitates restoration of stable H3-H4 chromatin states.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems having the ability to classify brain waves with greater accuracy are highly desirable. To this end, a number of techniques have been proposed aiming to be able to classify brain waves with high accuracy. However, the ability to classify brain waves and its implementation in real-time is still limited. In this study, we introduce a novel scheme for classifying motor imagery (MI) tasks using electroencephalography (EEG) signal that can be implemented in real-time having high classification accuracy between different MI tasks. We propose a new predictor, OPTICAL, that uses a combination of common spatial pattern (CSP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) network for obtaining improved MI EEG signal classification. A sliding window approach is proposed to obtain the time-series input from the spatially filtered data, which becomes input to the LSTM network. Moreover, instead of using LSTM directly for classification, we use regression based output of the LSTM network as one of the features for classification. On the other hand, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is used to reduce the dimensionality of the CSP variance based features. The features in the reduced dimensional plane after performing LDA are used as input to the support vector machine (SVM) classifier together with the regression based feature obtained from the LSTM network. The regression based feature further boosts the performance of the proposed OPTICAL predictor. OPTICAL showed significant improvement in the ability to accurately classify left and right-hand MI tasks on two publically available datasets. The improvements in the average misclassification rates are 3.09% and 2.07% for BCI Competition IV Dataset I and GigaDB dataset, respectively. The Matlab code is available at https://github.com/ShiuKumar/OPTICAL .

Reservoir reconstruction, where parameter prediction plays a key role, constitutes an extremely important part in oil and gas reservoir exploration. With the mature development of artificial intelligence, parameter prediction methods are gradually shifting from previous petrophysical models to deep learning models, which bring about obvious improvements in terms of accuracy and efficiency. However, it is difficult to achieve large amount of data acquisition required for deep learning due to the cost of detection, technical difficulties, and the limitations of complex geological parameters. To address the data shortage problem, a transfer learning prediction model based on long short-term memory neural networks has been proposed, and the model structure has been determined by parameter search and optimization methods in this paper. The proposed approach transfers knowledge from historical data to enhance new well prediction by sharing some parameters in the neural network structure. Moreover, the practicality and effectiveness of this method was tested by comparison based on two block datasets. The results showed that this method could significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the reservoir parameters in the event of data shortage.

Studies of the memory capabilities of nonhuman primates have consistently revealed a relative weakness for auditory compared to visual or tactile stimuli: extensive training is required to learn auditory memory tasks, and subjects are only capable of retaining acoustic information for a brief period of time. Whether a parallel deficit exists in human auditory memory remains an outstanding question. In the current study, a short-term memory paradigm was used to test human subjects' retention of simple auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli that were carefully equated in terms of discriminability, stimulus exposure time, and temporal dynamics. Mean accuracy did not differ significantly among sensory modalities at very short retention intervals (1-4 s). However, at longer retention intervals (8-32 s), accuracy for auditory stimuli fell substantially below that observed for visual and tactile stimuli. In the interest of extending the ecological validity of these findings, a second experiment tested recognition memory for complex, naturalistic stimuli that would likely be encountered in everyday life. Subjects were able to identify all stimuli when retention was not required, however, recognition accuracy following a delay period was again inferior for auditory compared to visual and tactile stimuli. Thus, the outcomes of both experiments provide a human parallel to the pattern of results observed in nonhuman primates. The results are interpreted in light of neuropsychological data from nonhuman primates, which suggest a difference in the degree to which auditory, visual, and tactile memory are mediated by the perirhinal and entorhinal cortices.

In this study, we investigated visual short-term memory for coherent motion in action video game players (AVGPs), non-action video game players (NAVGPs), and non-gamers (control group: CONs). Participants performed a visual memory-masking paradigm previously used with macaque monkeys and humans. In particular, we tested whether video game players form a more robust visual short-term memory trace for coherent moving stimuli during the encoding phase, and whether such memory traces are less affected by an intervening masking stimulus presented 0.2 s after the offset of the to-be-remembered sample. The results showed that task performance of all groups was affected by the masking stimulus, but video game players were affected to a lesser extent than controls. Modelling of performance values and reaction times revealed that video game players have a lower guessing rate than CONs, and higher drift rates than CONs, indicative of more efficient perceptual decisions. These results suggest that video game players exhibit a more robust VSTM trace for moving objects and this trace is less prone to external interference.

Environmental enrichment (EE) has been used to investigate behavioral changes and neuroplasticity in brain in normal and pathological conditions. Besides, the EE has been used to understand the neurobehavioral systems involved in learning experiences, visual inputs, defensive responses, social interactions and memory. However, the required exposure duration to remove aversive memories remains lacking. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the time-course effect of EE exposure on the extinction of aversive memory. Young adult male Wistar rats were exposed to two different EE protocols: short-term environmental enrichment (EE2 - animal kept under enriched conditions for two weeks) and long-term environmental enrichment (EE4 - animal kept under enriched conditions for four weeks). The contextual fear conditioning test was used to assess aversive memory. The both EE protocols provide changes in Zif-268 immunoreactivity in mesocorticolimbic areas such as CA1 and central amygdala; however, only short-term EE reduces the ZIF-268 immunoreactivity in VTA. Besides, both EE protocols also provide an increase in TH immunoreactivity in VTA and nucleus accumbens, but only the short-term EE modifies the TH immunoreactivity in CA1 and infralimbic region of the prefrontal cortex. The time-course effect of EE interferes differently on the extinction of aversive memory, being two weeks of exposure with EE sufficient to cause improvement in coping during aversive situations, favoring the extinction of conditioned fear memory.

Recent studies have demonstrated that retinotopic cortex maintains information about visual stimuli during retention intervals. However, the process by which transient stimulus-evoked sensory responses are transformed into enduring memory representations is unknown. Here, using fMRI and short-term visual memory tasks optimized for univariate and multivariate analysis approaches, we report differential involvement of human retinotopic areas during memory encoding of the low-level visual feature orientation. All visual areas show weaker responses when memory encoding processes are interrupted, possibly due to effects in orientation-sensitive primary visual cortex (V1) propagating across extrastriate areas. Furthermore, intermediate areas in both dorsal (V3a/b) and ventral (LO1/2) streams are significantly more active during memory encoding compared with non-memory (active and passive) processing of the same stimulus material. These effects in intermediate visual cortex are also observed during memory encoding of a different stimulus feature (spatial frequency), suggesting that these areas are involved in encoding processes on a higher level of representation. Using pattern-classification techniques to probe the representational content in visual cortex during delay periods, we further demonstrate that simply initiating memory encoding is not sufficient to produce long-lasting memory traces. Rather, active maintenance appears to underlie the observed memory-specific patterns of information in retinotopic cortex.

Breaks filled with different break activities often interrupt cognitive performance in everyday life. Previous studies have reported that both enhancing and deteriorating effects on challenging ongoing tasks such as working memory updating, depend on the type of break activity. However, neural mechanisms of these break-related alterations in working memory performance have not been studied, to date. Therefore, we conducted a brain imaging study to identify the neurobiological correlates of effects on the n-back working memory task related to different break activities. Before performing the n-back task in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, young adults were exposed to break activities in the MRI scanner involving (i) eyes-open resting, (ii) listening to music, and (iii) playing the video game "Angry Birds". Heart rate was measured by a pulse oximeter during the experiment. We found that increased heart rate during gaming as well as decreased relaxation levels after a video gaming break was related to poorer n-back task performance, as compared to listening to music. On the neural level, video gaming reduced supplementary motor area activation during working memory performance. These results may indicate that video gaming during a break may affect working memory performance by interfering with arousal state and frontal cognitive control functions.

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) causes the release of several neuromodulators, leading to cortical activation and deactivation. The resulting preparatory cortical plasticity can be used to increase learning and memory in both rats and humans. The effects of VNS on cognition have mostly been studied either in animal models of different pathologies, and/or after extended VNS. Considerably less is known about the effects of acute VNS. Here, we examined the effects of acute VNS on short-term memory and cognitive flexibility in naïve rats, using three cognitive tasks that require comparatively brief (single session) training periods. In all tasks, VNS was delivered immediately before or during the testing phase. We used a rule-shifting task to test cognitive flexibility, a novel object recognition task to measure short-term object memory, and a delayed spontaneous alternation task to measure spatial short-term memory. We also analyzed exploratory behavior in an elevated plus maze to determine the effects of acute VNS on anxiety. Our results indicate that acute VNS can improve memory and cognitive flexibility relative to Sham-stimulation, and these effects are independent of unspecific VNS-induced changes in locomotion or anxiety.

The endocannabinoid system plays a key role in the control of emotional responses to environmental challenges. CB1 receptors are highly expressed within cortico-limbic brain areas, where they modulate stress effects on memory processes. Glucocorticoid and endocannabinoid release is influenced by circadian rhythm. Here, we investigated how different stress intensities immediately after encoding influence rat short-term memory in an object recognition task, whether the effects depend on circadian rhythm and if exogenous augmentation of anandamide levels could restore any observed impairment. Two separate cohorts of male adult Sprague-Dawley rats were tested at two different times of the day, morning (inactivity phase) or afternoon (before the onset of the activity phase) in an object recognition task. The anandamide hydrolysis inhibitor URB597 was intraperitoneally administered immediately after the training trial. Rats were thereafter subjected to a forced swim stress under low or high stress conditions and tested 1 h after training. Control rats underwent the same experimental procedure except for the forced swim stress (no stress). We further investigated whether URB597 administration might modulate corticosterone release in rats subjected to the different stress conditions, both in the morning or afternoon. The low stressor elevated plasma corticosterone levels and impaired 1 h recognition memory performance when animals were tested in the morning. Exposure to the higher stress condition elevated plasma corticosterone levels and impaired memory performance, independently of the testing time. These findings show that stress impairing effects on short-term recognition memory are dependent on the intensity of stress and circadian rhythm. URB597 (0.3 mg kg-1) rescued the altered memory performance and decreased corticosterone levels in all the impaired groups yet leaving memory unaltered in the non-impaired groups.

Oculomotor behaviors integrate sensory and prior information to overcome sensory-motor delays and noise. After much debate about this process, reliability-based integration has recently been proposed and several models of smooth pursuit now include recurrent Bayesian integration or Kalman filtering. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in humans supporting these theoretical predictions. Here, we independently manipulated the reliability of visual and prior information in a smooth pursuit task. Our results show that both smooth pursuit eye velocity and catch-up saccade amplitude were modulated by visual and prior information reliability. We interpret these findings as the continuous reliability-based integration of a short-term memory of target motion with visual information, which support modeling work. Furthermore, we suggest that saccadic and pursuit systems share this short-term memory. We propose that this short-term memory of target motion is quickly built and continuously updated, and constitutes a general building block present in all sensorimotor systems.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a working memory procedure, we compared source memory judgments (format and location) with old-new judgments in young and older adults. Consistent with previous fMRI findings, for young adults, an area of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex showed greater activity during format than old-new judgments made immediately, as well as those made after a brief, filled delay. In contrast, for older adults, activity in this area was not greater during format than old-new judgments at either retention interval. These data provide additional evidence that left lateral prefrontal cortex is important in monitoring specific source information and new evidence that older adults' source memory deficits may be related, in part, to reduced function of this brain area.

Recent evidence suggests that visual short-term memory (VSTM) capacity estimated using simple objects, such as colours and oriented bars, may not generalise well to more naturalistic stimuli. More visual detail can be stored in VSTM when complex, recognisable objects are maintained compared to simple objects. It is not yet known if it is recognisability that enhances memory precision, nor whether maintenance of recognisable objects is achieved with the same network of brain regions supporting maintenance of simple objects. We used a novel stimulus generation method to parametrically warp photographic images along a continuum, allowing separate estimation of the precision of memory representations and the number of items retained. The stimulus generation method was also designed to create unrecognisable, though perceptually matched, stimuli, to investigate the impact of recognisability on VSTM. We adapted the widely-used change detection and continuous report paradigms for use with complex, photographic images. Across three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, we demonstrated greater precision for recognisable objects in VSTM compared to unrecognisable objects. This clear behavioural advantage was not the result of recruitment of additional brain regions, or of stronger mean activity within the core network. Representational similarity analysis revealed greater variability across item repetitions in the representations of recognisable, compared to unrecognisable complex objects. We therefore propose that a richer range of neural representations support VSTM for complex recognisable objects.

Doubts have been cast on the strict dissociation between short- and long-term memory systems. Specifically, several neuroimaging studies have shown that the medial temporal lobe, a region almost invariably associated with long-term memory, is involved in active short-term memory maintenance. Furthermore, a recent study in hippocampally lesioned patients has shown that the hippocampus is critically involved in associating objects and their locations, even when the delay period lasts only 8 s. However, the critical feature that causes the medial temporal lobe, and in particular the hippocampus, to participate in active maintenance is still unknown. This study was designed in order to explore hippocampal involvement in active maintenance of spatial and non-spatial associations. Eighteen participants performed a delayed-match-to-sample task in which they had to maintain either object-location associations, color-number association, single colors, or single locations. Whole-brain activity was measured using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging and analyzed using a random effects model. Right lateralized hippocampal activity was evident when participants had to maintain object-location associations, but not when they had to maintain object-color associations or single items. The present results suggest a hippocampal involvement in active maintenance when feature combinations that include spatial information have to be maintained online.