Want Your Baby to Learn? Research Shows Sitting Up Helps

From the Mozart effect to educational videos, many parents want to aid their infants in learning. New research out of North Dakota State University, Fargo, and Texas A&M shows that something as simple as the body position of babies while they learn plays a critical role in their cognitive development.

The study shows that for babies, sitting up, either by themselves or with assistance, plays a significant role in how infants learn. The research titled “Posture Support Improves Object Individuation in Infants,” co-authored by Rebecca J. Woods, assistant professor of human development and family science and doctoral psychology lecturer at North Dakota State University, and by psychology professor Teresa Wilcox of Texas A&M, is published in the journal Developmental Psychology®.

The study’s results show that babies’ ability to sit up unsupported has a profound effect on their ability to learn about objects. The research also shows that when babies who cannot sit up alone are given posture support from infant seats that help them sit up, they learn as well as babies who can already sit alone.

“An important part of human cognitive development is the ability to understand whether an object in view is the same or different from an object seen earlier,” said Dr. Woods. Through two experiments, she confirmed that 5-and-a-half- and 6-and-a-half-month-olds don’t use patterns to differentiate objects on their own. However, 6-and-a-half-month-olds can be primed to use patterns, if they have the opportunity to look at, touch and mouth the objects before being tested.

“An advantage the 6-and-a-half-month-olds may have is the ability to sit unsupported, which makes it easier for babies to reach for, grasp and manipulate objects. If babies don’t have to focus on balancing, their attention can be on exploring the object,” said Woods.

In a third experiment, 5-and-a-half-month-olds were given full postural support while they explored objects. When they had posture support, they were able to use patterns to differentiate objects. The research study also suggests that delayed sitting may cause babies to miss learning experiences that affect other areas of development.

“Helping a baby sit up in a secure, well-supported manner during learning sessions may help them in a wide variety of learning situations, not just during object-feature learning,” Woods said. “This knowledge can be advantageous, particularly to infants who have cognitive delays who truly need an optimal learning environment.”

Brain cells activated, reactivated in learning and memory

Memories are made of this, the song says. Now neuroscientists have for the first time shown individual mouse brain cells being switched on during learning and later reactivated during memory recall. The results are published Dec. 13 in the journal Current Biology.

We store episodic memories about events in our lives in a part of a brain called the hippocampus, said Brian Wiltgen, now an assistant professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. (Most of the work was conducted while Wiltgen was working at the University of Virginia.) In animals, the hippocampus is important for navigation and storing memories about places.

"The exciting part is that we are now in a position to answer a fundamental question about memory," Wiltgen said. "It’s been assumed for a long time that the hippocampus is essential for memory because it drives reactivation of neurons (nerve cells) in the cortex. The reason you can remember an event from your life is because the hippocampus is able to recreate the pattern of cortical activity that was there at the time."

According to this model, patients with damage to the hippocampus lose their memories because they can’t recreate the activity in the cortex from when the memory was made. Wiltgen’s mouse experiment makes it possible to test this model for the first time.

After 100 Years, Understanding the Electrical Role of Dendritic Spines

It’s the least understood organ in the human body: the brain, a massive network of electrically excitable neurons, all communicating with one another via receptors on their tree-like dendrites. Somehow these cells work together to enable great feats of human learning and memory. But how?

Researchers know dendritic spines play a vital role. These tiny membranous structures protrude from dendrites’ branches; spread across the entire dendritic tree, the spines on one neuron collect signals from an average of 1,000 others. But more than a century after they were discovered, their function still remains only partially understood.

A Northwestern University researcher, working in collaboration with scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Farm Research Campus, has recently added an important piece of the puzzle of how neurons “talk” to one another. The researchers have demonstrated that spines serve as electrical compartments in the neuron, isolating and amplifying electrical signals received at the synapses, the sites at which neurons connect to one another.

The key to this discovery is the result of innovative experiments at the Janelia Farm Research Campus and computer simulations performed at Northwestern University that can measure electrical responses on spines throughout the dendrites.

A paper about the findings, “Synaptic Amplification by Dendritic Spines Enhances Input Cooperatively,” was published November 22 in the journal Nature.

“This research conclusively shows that dendritic spines respond to and process synaptic inputs not just chemically, but also electrically,” said William Kath, professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, professor of neurobiology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and one of the paper’s authors.

Infants learn to look and look to learn

Researchers at the University of Iowa have documented an activity by infants that begins nearly from birth: They learn by taking inventory of the things they see.

In a new paper, the psychologists contend that infants create knowledge by looking at and learning about their surroundings. The activities should be viewed as intertwined, rather than considered separately, to fully appreciate how infants gain knowledge and how that knowledge is seared into memory.

“The link between looking and learning is much more intricate than what people have assumed,” says John Spencer, a psychology professor at the UI and a co-author on the paper published in the journal Cognitive Science.

The researchers created a mathematical model that mimics, in real time and through months of child development, how infants use looking to understand their environment. Such a model is important because it validates the importance of looking to learning and to forming memories. It also can be adapted by child development specialists to help special-needs children and infants born prematurely to combine looking and learning more effectively.

“The model can look, like infants, at a world that includes dynamic, stimulating events that influence where it looks. We contend (the model) provides a critical link to studying how social partners influence how infants distribute their looks, learn, and develop,” the authors write.

Alcoholic fly larvae need fix for learning

Fly larvae fed on alcohol-spiked food for a period of days grow dependent on those spirits for learning. The findings, reported in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on November 29th, show how overuse of alcohol can produce lasting changes in the brain, even after alcohol abuse stops.

The report also provides evidence that the very human experience of alcoholism can be explored in part with studies conducted in fruit flies and other animals, the researchers say.

"Our evidence supports the long-ago proposed idea that functional ethanol tolerance is produced by adaptations that counter the effects of ethanol, and that these adaptations help the nervous system function more normally when ethanol is present," says Brooks Robinson of The University of Texas at Austin. "However, when ethanol is withheld, the adaptations persist to give the nervous system abnormal properties that manifest themselves as symptoms of withdrawal."

Robinson and his colleagues found that alcohol consumption, at a level equivalent to mild intoxication in humans, at first impeded learning by fly larvae. More specifically, those larvae had some trouble in associating an unpleasant heat pulse with an otherwise attractive odor in comparison to larvae that had not been drinking alcohol.

After a six-day drinking binge, however, those larvae adapted and could learn as well as normal larvae could. In fact, the alcohol-adapted animals learned poorly when their ethanol was taken away from them. And, when given alcohol back, their learning deficit was erased.

Robinson says that the findings are the first proof of cognitive ethanol dependence in an invertebrate, suggesting that some of ethanol’s ability to change behavior must begin at the cellular level. After all, flies and humans share many of the same features at the level of individual neurons, and not so much in terms of the way those neurons are put together into working circuits.

Preschoolers at play show science skills

When kids incessantly ask “Why?,” mess around in the dirt and run their hands over everything within reach, they’re not just being kids. It turns out they’re also being scientists.

Until recently, preschoolers were widely believed to be irrational thinkers. For most of the 20th century, the prevailing theory pioneered by cognitive development expert Jean Piaget held that children roughly ages 2 through 7 cannot understand concrete logic or other people’s perspectives.

Although young children are the only ones who truly know what they ponder, research conducted over the past decade has led many psychologists to see infants and toddlers as, in fact, capable of thinking logically and abstractly.

"The main thing is that they’re drawing conclusions from data and evidence and experiences the same way scientists are - by making hypotheses, testing them, analyzing statistics and even doing experiments, even though when they do experiments, it’s called ‘getting into everything,’ " said Alison Gopnik, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and one of the field’s leading experts.

Better understanding of how children learn about the world could have important implications for their formal schooling, Gopnik argued in a recent paper published in the journal Science, which summarized studies by her and other researchers.

Re-learning words lost to dementia

A simple word-training program has been found to restore key words in people with a type of dementia that attacks language and our memory for words.

This ability to relearn vocabulary indicates that even in brains affected by dementia, some recovery of function is possible.

The study, led by Ms Sharon Savage at NeuRA (Neuroscience Research Australia), utilised a simple computer training-program that paired images of household objects such as food, appliances, utensils, tools and clothing, with their names.

“People with this type of dementia lose semantic memory, the memory system we use to store and remember words and their meanings,” says Ms Savage.

“Even the simplest words around the house can be difficult to recall. For example, a person with this type of dementia usually knows what a kettle does, but they may not know what to call it and may not recognize the word ‘kettle’ when they hear it,” she says.

Ms Savage found that after just 3 weeks of training for 30–60 min each day, patients’ ability to recall the name of the items improved, even for patients with more advanced forms of the dementia.

“Semantic dementia is a younger-onset dementia and because sufferers lose everyday words life can be very frustrating for them and their families. By relearning some of these everyday words, day to day conversations around the house may become less frustrating, improving patient well-being,” Ms Savage concludes.

This paper is published in the journal Cortex.

Study pinpoints brain area’s role in learning

An area of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex is responsible for decisions made on the spur of the moment, but not those made based on prior experience or habit, according to a new basic science study from substance abuse researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Scientists had previously believed that the area of the brain was responsible for both types of behavior and decision-making. The distinction is critical to understanding the neurobiology of decision-making, particularly with regard to substance abuse. The study was published online in the journal Science.

Scientists have assumed that the orbitofrontal cortex plays a role in “value-based” decision-making, when a person compares options and weights consequences and rewards to choose best alternative. The Science study shows that this area of the brain is involved in decision-making only when the value must be inferred or computed rapidly or hastily. If the value has been “cached” or pre-computed, like a habit, then the orbitofrontal cortex is not necessary.

The same is true for learning — if a person infers an outcome but it does not happen, the resulting error can drive learning. The study shows that the orbitofrontal cortex is necessary for the inferred value that is used for this type of learning.

"Our research showed that damage to the orbitofrontal cortex may decrease a person’s ability to use prior experience to make good decisions on the fly," says lead author Joshua Jones, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a research scientist at NIDA, part of the National Institutes of Health. "The person isn’t able to consider the whole continuum of the decision — the mind’s map of how choices play out further down the road. Instead, the person is going to regress to habitual behavior, gravitating toward the choice that provides the most value in its immediate reward."

The study enhances scientists’ understanding of how the brain works in healthy and unhealthy individuals, according to the researchers.

"This discovery has general implications in understanding how the brain processes information to help us make good decisions and to learn from our mistakes," says senior author Geoffrey Schoenbaum, M.D., Ph.D., adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and senior investigator and chief of the Cellular Neurobiology Research Branch at NIDA. "Understanding more about the orbitofrontal cortex also is important for understanding disorders such as addiction that seem to involve maladaptive decision-making and learning. Cocaine in particular seems to have long-lasting effects on the orbitofrontal cortex. One aspect of this work, which we are pursuing, is that perhaps some of the problems that characterize addiction are the result of drug-induced changes in this area of the brain."

(Image: iStock)

Call that a ball? Dogs learn to associate words with objects differently than humans do

Previous studies have shown that humans between the ages of two to three typically learn to associate words with the shapes of objects, rather than their size or texture. For example, toddlers who learn what a ‘ball’ is and are then presented other objects with similar shapes, sizes or textures will identify a similarly-shaped object as ‘ball’, rather than one of the same size or texture.

Earlier research with dogs has shown that they can learn to associate words with categories of objects (such as ‘toy’), but whether their learning process was the same as that of humans was unknown.

In this new study, the scientists presented Gable, a five year old Border Collie, with similar choices to see if this ‘shape bias’ exists in dogs. They found that after a brief training period, Gable learned to associate the name of an object with its size, identifying other objects of similar size by the same name. After a longer period of exposure to both a name and an object, the dog learned to associate a word to other objects of similar textures, but not to objects of similar shape.

According to the authors, these results suggest that dogs (or at least Gable) process and associate words with objects in qualitatively different ways than humans do. They add that this may be due to differences in how evolutionary history has shaped human and dog senses of perceiving shape, texture or size.

Brain waves encode rules for behavior

One of the biggest puzzles in neuroscience is how our brains encode thoughts, such as perceptions and memories, at the cellular level. Some evidence suggests that ensembles of neurons represent each unique piece of information, but no one knows just what these ensembles look like, or how they form.

A new study from researchers at MIT and Boston University (BU) sheds light on how neural ensembles form thoughts and support the flexibility to change one’s mind. The research team, led by Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, identified groups of neurons that encode specific behavioral rules by oscillating in synchrony with each other.

The results suggest that the nature of conscious thought may be rhythmic, according to the researchers, who published their findings in the Nov. 21 issue of Neuron.

“As we talk, thoughts float in and out of our heads. Those are all ensembles forming and then reconfiguring to something else. It’s been a mystery how the brain does this,” says Miller, who is also a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “That’s the fundamental problem that we’re talking about — the very nature of thought itself.”