Mapping dynamic memories of gradually changing objects

Our brain is able to maintain a continuously updated memory representation of objects despite changes in their appearance over time (aging faces or objects, growing trees, etc.). Although this ability is crucial for cognition and behavior, it was barely explored. Here, we investigate this memory characteristic using a protocol emulating face transformation. Observers were presented with a sequence of faces that gradually transformed over many days, from a known face (source) to a new face (target), in presentations separated by other stimuli. This practice resulted in a drastic change in the memory and recognition of the faces. Although identification of the source and older face instances was reduced, recent face instances were increasingly identified as the source and rated as highly similar to the memory of the source. Using an object perturbation method, we estimated the corresponding memory shift, showing that memory patterns shifted from the source neighborhood toward the target. Our findings suggest that memory is updated to account for object changes over time while still keeping associations with past appearances. These experimental results are broadly compatible with a recently developed model of associative memory that assumes attractor dynamics with a learning rule facilitated by novelty, shown to hold when objects change gradually over short timescales.