New York Times – 16/3/2015, p. belluck
[...] a study claims to provide evidence of memory’s weakening by showing that people’s ability to remember something and the pattern of brain activity that thing generates both appear to diminish when a competing memory gets stronger. Demonstrating sophisticated use of brain scans in memory research, authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, appear to have identified neural fingerprints of specific memories, distinguishing brain activity patterns produced when viewing a picture of a necklace, say, from a picture of binoculars or other objects. The experiment, conducted by scientists in Birmingham and Cambridge, England, involved several stages with 24 participants first trained to associate words to two unrelated black and white pictures from lists of famous people, ordinary objects or scenes. …
http://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3973.epdf?referrer_access_token=w5mRvLvcK9kK_NSDHTdcnNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0Pl9BAdvN7lWOsTUGCKBpNYPQv1q5qam7qS0PGq4Q9e4_IXmE3sOd1Uv7rUDO68k_TKgYWOaKamIl-nzaXBirq2NtrSPWDdqLQoPLtf2p31ir7RBtSjVnW2_hIIU_-TtvDqcI2zfQ2LorU1yGx4Q-yD8qyJXwEp6kr9uF7mw2gQFsds6RWMvs18lXFDyve-YUN2NvVi9a0DENCZYF5ItUd6W5kz-d7EJBsiKFhatL7deQ%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/science/memories-become-weaker-without-reinforcement-study-finds.html?ref=science&_r=0