J. Jay Todd

Storage limits found on brain's visual hard drive

Scientists have discovered the region of the brain responsible for the old adage, "out of sight, out of mind." The amount of information we can remember from a visual scene is extremely limited and the source of that limit may lie in the posterior parietal cortex, a region of the brain involved in visual short-term memory, researchers say. "Visual short-term memory is a key component of many perceptual and cognitive functions and is supported by a broad neural network, but it has a very limited storage capacity."