A collaboration between SISSA’s Physics and Neuroscience groups has taken a step forward in understanding how memories are stored and retrieved in the brain. The study, recently published in Neuron, shows that distinct perceptual biases—long thought to arise from separate brain systems—can, in fact, be explained by a single, biologically grounded mechanism.

The research, led by professors Sebastian Goldt and Mathew E. Diamond, and first author Francesca Schönsberg (now a junior research chair at the École Normale Supérieure), brings together theoretical physics, computational modeling, and behavioral neuroscience to bridge decades of fragmented research on perceptual memory. Yukti Chopra and Davide Giana carried out laboratory experiments to provide the empirical data that the model was tested against.