(3) It is well accepted that the hippocampus/medial temporal lobe region associates attended information with other existing representations throughout the brain (Davachi, 2006 and Ranganath, 2010). The resulting configural representations bind multiple features (e.g., perceptual, spatial, temporal, semantic, emotional details) together and give representations an episodic quality (i.e., they have source or contextual information). Are there differences in configural processing active during perception and reflection? Sensory information (e.g., sights, sounds,

smells) arrives from different locations in space and points in time. Perceptual attention selects and modulates this information according to current task goals. In the PRAM framework, such processing yields persisting records (traces or memories). Because most research has used visual stimuli, www.selleckchem.com/products/MDV3100.html our review will focus on the visual modality. Limited processing capacity prevents equal attention to Volasertib price all items, but when cues direct selective

attention to specific locations, perceptual performance is enhanced for cued items (Posner et al., 1980), as is memory for these attended items (Eger et al., 2004 and Uncapher et al., 2011). Perceptual attention can also select on the basis of features. In a classic study, Rock and Gutman (1981) showed participants two abstract shapes that spatially overlapped on each trial. One shape was red and one was green, and each participant was told to attend to shapes in only one of the colors. Shapes in the other color were poorly remembered later, even though they spatially overlapped with attended shapes that were remembered. Even with only brief exposures, we appear to store a great deal of detailed perceptual information about selected information (Hollingworth and Henderson, 2002 and Potter, 1976). Adenosine For example, in one study (Brady et al., 2008), participants saw 2,500 pictures of objects, each for 3 s, with instructions to try to remember them. On a later forced-choice recognition test, participants selected the correct previously seen item 92%

of the time; even more remarkably, performance was still 87% when participants were required to discriminate between an original picture and the same object in a different state or orientation. In priming studies using even briefer presentations, and no instructions to remember, participants show memory for quite specific representations, although participants do not consciously recognize the items (repetition priming; e.g., Tulving and Schacter, 1990, Wiggs and Martin, 1998 and Henson and Rugg, 2003). For example, if participants saw an item for 1 s, they were subsequently better able to identify it under degraded stimulus conditions, even when they did not remember having seen the item before (e.g., Jacoby and Dallas, 1981).