While studies have linked brain areas to remembering personal experiences, brain areas involved in learning more impersonal information about the world remain unclear. In a new JNeurosci paper, Scott Fairhall and colleagues, from the University of Trento, used fMRI on 29 human volunteers as they performed a learning task to shed light on how the brain acquires semantic, impersonal information.
In the task, participants learned 120 fictitious facts about three imaginary civilizations based off fantasy works, like Game of Thrones. Nearly 2 d later, researchers assessed which facts people recalled better than others during a memory test. Brain imaging pointed to activity from distinct regions that were sensitive to semantic information about places and people during learning. The quality of activity in two of these regions, representing the strength of the information about places and people, could even predict whether people recalled the information during the memory task.
Says Fairhill, "These findings suggest that the mechanism for learning new facts about the world is partially distinct from the previously well-characterized brain mechanisms for remembering things that happen in our lives, which depends on different structures."
