Posts tagged memory
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Researchers reveal first brain study of Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin, perhaps the world’s most famous person with autism, has exceptional nonverbal intelligence and spatial memory, and her brain has a host of structural and functional differences compared with the brains of controls, according to a presentation Saturday at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in New Orleans.
Grandin, professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, is an outspoken advocate for autism research and awareness. She is known as a ‘savant,’ or a person who shows characteristic social deficits of autism and yet also has some exceptional abilities. For instance, she has extremely sharp visual acuity.
This is the first study to take a close look at Grandin’s brain, and one of the first to look at the brains of savants.
Neuroscientists find the molecular “When” and “Where” of memory formation
Neuroscientists from New York University and the University of California, Irvine have isolated the “when” and “where” of molecular activity that occurs in the formation of short-, intermediate-, and long-term memories. Their findings, which appear in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer new insights into the molecular architecture of memory formation and, with it, a better roadmap for developing therapeutic interventions for related afflictions.
“Our findings provide a deeper understanding of how memories are created,” explained the research team leader Thomas Carew, a professor in NYU’s Center for Neural Science and dean of NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Science. “Memory formation is not simply a matter of turning molecules on and off; rather, it results from a complex temporal and spatial relationship of molecular interaction and movement.”
Neuroscientists have previously uncovered different aspects of molecular signaling relevant to the formation of memories. But less understood is the spatial relationship between molecules and when they are active during this process.
To address this question, the researchers studied the neurons in Aplysia californica, the California sea slug. Aplysia is a model organism that is quite powerful for this type of research because its neurons are 10 to 50 times larger than those of higher organisms, such as vertebrates, and it possesses a relatively small network of neurons—characteristics that readily allow for the examination of molecular signaling during memory formation. Moreover, its coding mechanism for memories is highly conserved in evolution, and thus is similar to that of mammals, making it an appropriate model for understanding how this process works in humans.
The scientists focused their study on two molecules, MAPK and PKA, which earlier research has shown to be involved in many forms of memory and synaptic plasticity—that is, changes in the brain that occur after neuronal interaction. But less understood was how and where these molecules interacted.
To explore this, the researchers subjected the sea slugs to sensitization training, which induces increased behavioral reflex responsiveness following mild tail shock, or in this study, mild activation of the nerve form the tail. They then examined the subsequent molecular activity of both MAPK and PKA. Both molecules have been shown to be involved in the formation of memory for sensitization, but the nature of their interaction is less clear.
What they found was MAPK and PKA coordinate their activity both spatially and temporally in the formation of memories. Specifically, in the formation of intermediate-term (i.e., hours) and long-term (i.e., days) memories, both MAPK and PKA activity occur, with MAPK spurring PKA action. By contrast, for short-term memories (i.e., less than 30 minutes), only PKA is active, with no involvement of MAPK.
(Source: nyu.edu)
Study shows old adage ‘sleep on it’ is true – but only if it’s a really difficult problem
A new study from Lancaster University has found that sleeping on a problem really can help people to find a solution.
The study, published online this week in the journal Memory & Cognition, tested whether sleep or time spent awake worked best in helping people find the solutions to a range of problem solving tasks.
The authors of the study - Ut Na Sio, Padraic Monaghan and Tom Ormerod all from the Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning at Lancaster’s Department of Psychology - concluded that sleep facilitates problem solving but this has its primary effect for harder problems.
Professor Padraic Monaghan said: “We’ve known for years that sleep has a profound effect on our ability to be creative and find new solutions to problems. Our study shows that this sleep effect is greatest when the problems facing us are difficult. Sleep appears to help us solve problems by accessing information that is remote to the initial problem, that may not be initially brought to mind. Sleep has been proposed to ‘spread activation’ to the solution that is initially distant from our first attempts at the problem. The advice stemming from this and related research is to leave a problem aside if you’re stuck, and get some sleep if it’s a really difficult problem.”
More than Just ‘Zoning Out’ – Psychological Science Examines the Cognitive Processes Underlying Mind Wandering
It happens innocently enough: One minute you’re sitting at your desk, working on a report, and the next minute you’re thinking about how you probably need to do laundry and that you want to try the new restaurant down the street. Mind wandering is a frequent and common occurrence. And while mind wandering in certain situations – in class, for example – can be counterproductive, some research suggests that mind wandering isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
New research published in the journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores mind wandering in various contexts, examining how mind wandering is related to cognitive processes involved in working memory and executive control.
Reducing visual clutter may help Alzheimer’s patients
It’s a finding that could help Alzheimer’s patients better cope with their condition.
Psychologists at the University of Toronto and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have shown that the inability to recognize once-familiar faces and objects may have as much to do with difficulty perceiving their distinct features as it does with the capacity to recall from memory.
A study published in the October issue of Hippocampus suggests that memory impairments for people diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease may in part be due to problems with determining the differences between similar objects.
The research contributes to growing evidence that a part of the brain once believed to support memory exclusively – the medial temporal lobe – also plays a role in object perception.
Study links hippocampus with unconscious bias
The hippocampus is an area of the brain known to be one in which links between memories are formed, but until now it was not known that this brain region is involved in steering the brain towards making particular choices over others when faced with new decisions for which we have no previous experiences to draw on.
In a paper published in the journal Science, research psychologists G. Elliott Wimmer and Daphna Shohamy of Columbia University in New York report on their study, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of regions of the brain. In the study, they asked 31 volunteers to complete a three-part task while in the machine. Throughout the task their brain activity was determined by the fMRI.
The results suggest that several areas of the brain are involved in evaluating new stimuli and associating them with previous memories, but the process is strongly associated with the hippocampus.
The findings could have application, for example, in the design of new products, which could incorporate aspects of earlier products (such as color, logo or font) to stimulate the association and produce an unconscious bias towards those products over other equally new products.
The findings also suggest that misguided biases such as racism could stem from unconscious associations. (Guilt by association is a commonly known bias.) These biases have long been known, but the current study clearly shows their association with the hippocampus.
Memory: Do animals ever forget?
From pigeons that can recognise faces to a chimp that stores rocks to throw at visitors, all animals have memories. But how similar are they to ours?
(Image: Matt Jacob/Tendance Floue)
EVERY morning, you take a walk in the park, bringing some bread to feed the pigeons. As the days wear on, you begin to see the birds as individuals; you even start to name them. But what do the pigeons remember of you? Do they think kindly of you as they drop off to sleep at night, or is your face a blank, indistinguishable from the others strolling through the park?
These questions may seem whimsical, but knowing what other creatures recall is crucial if we are to understand their inner lives. It turns out that the range of mnemonic feats in the wild is nearly as varied as life itself.
If you take memory to mean any ability to store and respond to past events, even the simplest organisms meet the grade. Blobs of slime mould, for instance, which can slowly crawl across a surface, seem to note the timing of changes to their climate, slowing their movement in anticipation of an expected dry spell - even when it never actually arrives.
With the emergence of the first neurons about half a billion years ago, memories became more intricate as information could be stored in the patterns of electrical connections within the nervous system. This type of learning may have been behind the Cambrian explosion - the sudden appearance and rapid evolution of more complex species about 530 million years ago - because it enabled animals to exploit new niches, say Eva Jablonka at Tel Aviv University and Simona Ginsburg at the Open University of Israel.
Over the following few hundred million years, increasingly advanced skills could emerge with different forces driving the evolution of each creature’s mind. The result is a surprising range of mnemonic feats throughout the animal kingdom. Migratory cardinal fish, for instance, can remember where they laid their eggs during the breeding season and, after over-wintering in deep water, return to within half a metre of the same spot. Animals as diverse as lizards, bees and octopuses can learn the way out of a maze, and pigeons have an excellent visual recognition, learning to recognise more than a thousand different images. They can even recognise individual humans and aren’t fooled by a change of clothes.
Such skills, although impressive, don’t match our experiences of episodic memory, in which we immerse ourselves in specific events. A pigeon might learn to associate your face with food, but it probably can’t remember your last meeting in the way you might be able to recall details of your last trip to the park.
The Dementia and Music Project - Chloe Meineck
This project is a culmination of two years research highlighting the advantages of listening to familiar music for dementia sufferers. This coupled with the fact that when many people move into a home they feel lost in their unfamiliar surroundings. The music box, which is all hand made, combines an interactive music player, with a memory box of co-designed special objects.
The film is Barbara talking about her life, her most important objects, music, events and her most treasured people.
Discovery of gatekeeper nerve cells explains the effect of nicotine on learning and memory
Researchers at Uppsala University have, together with Brazilian collaborators, discovered a new group of nerve cells that regulate processes of learning and memory. These cells act as gatekeepers and carry a receptor for nicotine, which can explain our ability to remember and sort information.
The discovery of the gatekeeper cells, which are part of a memory network together with several other nerve cells in the hippocampus, reveal new fundamental knowledge about learning and memory. The study is published today in Nature Neuroscience.
The hippocampus is an area of the brain that is important for consolidation of information into memories and helps us to learn new things. The newly discovered gatekeeper nerve cells, also called OLM-alpha2 cells, provide an explanation to how the flow of information is controlled in the hippocampus.
“It is known that nicotine improves cognitive processes including learning and memory, but this is the first time that an identified nerve cell population is linked to the effects of nicotine”, says Professor Klas Kullander at Uppsala University.