Most of us know that feeling of trying to retrieve a memory that does not come right away – an actor’s name, a phone number, etc. While memory retrieval has been the subject of countless animal studies and other neuroimaging work in humans, exactly how the process works—and how we make decisions based on memories—has remained unclear.
In a new study published in the June 26 issue of the journal Science, a collaborative team of neuroscientists from Caltech and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles has identified different sets of individual neurons responsible for memory-based decision-making, a hallmark of the human brain’s flexibility. Ralph Adolphs, Caltech’s Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology; director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center; and an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech was part of the collaboration.