Lost in the supermarket?

WuXi AppTec's content team editor It sounds incredible to get lost in the supermarket, but many people do have such experiences
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Imagine you come to the neatly arranged shelves confidently, heading towards the goal you have set in your head, going around and around.
As a result, the goods that should have appeared in front of you are gone, so you mute in your heart: Huh? I clearly remember it was here
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Finally, I found out that this supermarket chain was not the one I frequented.
Although the shelves look the same, the areas where the goods are placed are fundamentally different
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Why is the brain confused by similar scenes? A new study in "Nature Communications" investigated this.
The researchers recruited 27 volunteers to participate in an experiment.
They needed to watch an animation showing someone walking in 3 virtual cities.
Picture
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There are 7 stores in the city, 1 in the central area and 6 in the fringe area
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But the location and type of only 3 stores in the fringe area are fixed
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Each city also has a unique store
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Volunteers will start from the central store, and the next thing to do is to make a clear note of the location and types of stores in each city
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They have countless opportunities to repeat the simulated walking process until they are sure that they have memorized all the routes
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Next, the test began
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Researchers will start to ask them about the layout details of the three cities.
Simple questions such as which cities a store is located in, and complex ones will ask them to describe the distance between different stores.

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Those with a higher accuracy rate will have a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the same time in the next round of question and answer
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▲The urban scene seen by volunteers (picture source: reference [2]) According to the brain electrical activity displayed by MRI, the researchers found that the brain usually has completely different response measures when searching for different information, and it will learn new ones.
Information, but will not repeat learning similar information and experiences
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Like frequently seen scenes, our brains basically don't spend much time thinking about it
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So you think you are seriously recalling in front of the shelf, maybe your brain is not performing effective information extraction.
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It's like going to a restaurant to eat, basically we don't care who other customers are or what they are doing
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On the contrary, we will spend a lot of time on the people who eat together.
For example, eating with new colleagues and blind date is completely new information, and the brain will choose to learn this part of the information first
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The lead author of the study, Arne Ekstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, said: "The brain feels many things every day are similar.
There is no reason for it to spend limited energy on these things
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" Image source: 123RF research points out that these different environments However, information with similar scenes may be stored in the prefrontal cortex, but it will preferentially represent unique position information to the hippocampus and suppress information in the same scene
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The enlightenment from the research can not only help us discover how the brain interprets spatial information, it is more likely to help solve related neurological diseases and Alzheimer's disease
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They are using similar technology to design new virtual scenes, such as allowing elderly people to use virtual reality to go to the supermarket to determine their risk of Alzheimer's disease
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Reference: [1] Ever been lost in the grocery store? Researchers are closer to knowing why it happens.
Retrieved Nov 18th, 2021 from https://medicalxpress.
com/news/2021-11-lost-grocery-closer.
html [2] Li Zheng et al, Partially overlapping spatial environments trigger reinstatement in hippocampus and schema representations in prefrontal cortex, Nature Communications (2021).
DOI: 10.
1038/s41467-021-26560