Memory replay does not occur at a constant speed, but the changes were flexibly during recall, revealed study which is published in Nature Human Behaviour. They quickly skip episodic blocks of information when recalling events in summary - //for example, telling a friend about the plot of a movie they have seen, but can also delve into greater levels of detail at a slower speed when asked about a particular movie scene.
‘The understanding of flexible episodic memory may help PTSD sufferers troubled by slow, uncompressed replay of memories which haunt them. ’
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Experts at the Universities of Birmingham and Kent worked with a group of volunteers, who were asked to associate word-cues with a series of short videos, as the researchers investigated the flexible dynamics of episodic memory replay. Dr Simon Hanslmayr, Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Birmingham, commented: "Think about the scene in Pulp Fiction, where Vincent (John Travolta) tells Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) about his trip to Amsterdam - you might methodically and sequentially revisit every element of that particular dialogue because it's fun to do so."
"On the other hand, if a friend asks you what the movie is about you would mentally skip between key scenes - omitting less important information - as you quickly summarise the action." "We may be able to design therapies that speed up the replay process to recall these memories in a less disturbing way."
Researchers studied a group of 24 participants in the video study, supplemented by 23 volunteers who took part in a further study enhanced by real-time, non-invasive brain scanning (magnetencephalography or MEG).
The tests used six-second video clips featuring three separate but coherent sequences of a single theme, such as a ship sailing followed by a diver jumping into water followed by an octopus floating in the water. Researchers found that participants in the study were able to flexibly skip between 'sub-events' during memory replay, demonstrating different levels of information compression.
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Dr Hanslmayr worked with a group of refugees - half suffering from PTSD, the others not - and asked them to suppress neutral memories. Results showed that participants who struggled to control these thoughts were more likely to show symptoms of PTSD.
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Source-Eurekalert