New insights in human memory interference and consolidation

Learning new facts and skills in succession can be frustrating because no sooner has new knowledge been acquired than its retention is being jeopardized by learning another set of skills or facts. Interference between memories has recently provided important new insights into the neural and psychological systems responsible for memory processing. For example, interference not only occurs between the same types of memories, but can also occur between different types of memories, which has important implications for our understanding of memory organization. Converging evidence has begun to reveal that the brain produces interference independently from other aspects of memory processing, which suggests that interference may have an important but previously overlooked function. A memory's initial susceptibility to interference and subsequent resistance to interference after its acquisition has revealed that memories continue to be processed 'off-line' during consolidation. Recent work has demonstrated that off-line processing is not limited to just the stabilization of a memory, which was once the defining characteristic of consolidation; instead, off-line processing can have a rich diversity of effects, from enhancing performance to making hidden rules explicit. Off-line processing also occurs after memory retrieval when memories are destabilized and then subsequently restabalized during reconsolidation. Studies are beginning to reveal the function of reconsolidation, its mechanistic relationship to consolidation and its potential as a therapeutic target for the modification of memories

From creation to consolidation: a novel framework for memory processing

Long after playing squash, your brain continues to process the events that occurred during the game, thereby improving your game, and more generally, enhancing adaptive behavior. Understanding these mysterious processes may require novel theories

Brain rhythms: enhancing memories

Summary: A new study shows that different processes are responsible for maintaining relevant and suppressing irrelevant information. By promoting the suppression of irrelevant information, memories may be enhanced

Downs and Acrosses: Textual Markup on a Stroke Based Level

Textual encoding is one of the main focuses of Humanities Computing. However, existing encoding schemes and initiatives focus on 'text' from the character level upwards, and are of little use to scholars, such as papyrologists and palaeographers, who study the constituent strokes of individual characters. This paper discusses the development of a markup system used to annotate a corpus of images of Roman texts, resulting in an XML representation of each character on a stroke by stroke basis. The XML data generated allows further interrogation of the palaeographic data, increasing the knowledge available regarding the palaeography of the documentation produced by the Roman Army. Additionally, the corpus was used to train an Artificial Intelligence system to effectively 'read' in stroke data of unknown text and output possible, reliable, interpretations of that text: the next step in aiding historians in the reading of ancient texts. The development and implementation of the markup scheme is introduced, the results of our initial encoding effort are presented, and it is demonstrated that textual markup on a stroke level can extend the remit of marked-up digital texts in the humanities

Image and interpretation using artificial intelligence to read ancient Roman texts

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda are a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets have proved particularly difficult to read. This paper describes a system that assists expert papyrologists in the interpretation of the Vindolanda writing tablets. A model-based approach is taken that relies on models of the written form of characters, and statistical modelling of language, to produce plausible interpretations of the documents. Fusion of the contributions from the language, character, and image feature models is achieved by utilizing the GRAVA agent architecture that uses Minimum Description Length as the basis for information fusion across semantic levels. A system is developed that reads in image data and outputs plausible interpretations of the Vindolanda tablets

Synchronizing Sequencing Software to a Live Drummer

Copyright 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT allows authors to archive published versions of their articles after an embargo period. The article is available at

Memory processing: the critical role of neuronal replay during sleep

Patterns of neuronal activity present during learning in the hippocampus are replayed during sleep. A new study highlights the functional importance of this neurophysiological phenomenon by showing that neuronal replay is critical for memory processing over a night of sleep