Abstractions

摘要

Being able to read another person's mind is still science fiction. But Frank Tong, a cognitive neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee,rnand his colleague Stephenie Harrison might have brought this fantasy a little closer to reality. Researchers thought that brain areas involved in the earliest stages of visual processing, including the primary visual cortex, could not retain the information they interpret from the signals received from the eye. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Tong and Harrison have now shown that early visual areas do retain precise visual information about items that are no longer in the visual field-at least for a brief period (see page 632). Tong tells Nature more about the discovery.