The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging technique to get their data: > "It turned out that either visual stimulus—the grating or moving dots—resulted

The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging technique to get their data: > "It turned out that either visual stimulus—the grating or moving dots—resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in the visual cortex and parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is a part of the brain used in memory processing and storage. These two distinct visual memories carrying the same relevant information seemed to have been recoded into a shared abstract memory format. As a result, the pattern of brain activity trained to recall motion direction was indistinguishable from that trained to recall the grating orientation." Alternative hypothesis: the technique used wasn't sensitive enough to distinguish between how the brain handled the different information types.