Category: Memory

Infants could remember a new skill a day later.

A nap after learning helps a baby consolidate its learning and memories, a new study finds.

The study suggests that a flexible napping schedule could help infants learn.

Dr Jane Herbert, one of the study’s authors, said:

“These findings are particularly interesting to both parents and educationalists because they suggest that the optimal time for infants to learn new information is just before they have a sleep.

Until now people have presumed that the best time for infants to learn is when they are wide-awake, rather than when they are starting to feel tired, but our results show that activities occurring just before infants have a nap can be particularly valuable and well-remembered.”

The study, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), involved showing over 200 infants between six- and twelve-months-old how to remove a mitten from a puppet (Seehagen et al., 2015).

They were tested on their newly learned skill 4 hours later and after 24 hours.

Some of the infants napped within four hours of learning while others did not.

The results showed that only infants who napped for at least 30 minutes within four hours of learning could remember how to remove the puppet’s mitten.

Babies that did not nap within four hours could not remember.

Dr Jane Herbert continued:

“Parents receive lots of advice about what they should and shouldn’t do with their baby’s sleep schedule.

This study however examined learning opportunities around naturally occurring naps and shows just how valuable activities like reading books with young children just before they go down to sleep can be.”

The researchers conclude:

“Until now people have presumed that the best time for infants to learn is when they are wide-awake, rather than when they are starting to feel tired, but our results show that activities occurring just before infants have a nap can be particularly valuable and well-remembered.”

Image credit: Paul Goyette

New memory research has important implications for Alzheimer’s disease.

It should be possible to restore the memories of people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, scientists at UCLA have announced.

This is because long-term memory is not stored at the synapses — the connections between brain cells which are destroyed in Alzheimer’s disease — as neuroscientists have long thought.

Professor David Glanzman, who led the study, said:

“Long-term memory is not stored at the synapse.

That’s a radical idea, but that’s where the evidence leads.

The nervous system appears to be able to regenerate lost synaptic connections.

If you can restore the synaptic connections, the memory will come back. It won’t be easy, but I believe it’s possible.”

The conclusions come from research on a type of marine snail called Aplysia, which was published recently in eLife (Chen et al., 2014).

Professor Glanzman explained:

“If you train an animal on a task, inhibit its ability to produce proteins immediately after training, and then test it 24 hours later, the animal doesn’t remember the training.

However, if you train an animal, wait 24 hours, and then inject a protein synthesis inhibitor in its brain, the animal shows perfectly good memory 24 hours later.

In other words, once memories are formed, if you temporarily disrupt protein synthesis, it doesn’t affect long-term memory.

That’s true in the Aplysia and in human’s brains.”

The researchers carried out a number of experiments, all of which suggested that long-term memory was not stored at the synapses as was commonly thought.

Professor Glanzman continued:

“That suggests that the memory is not in the synapses but somewhere else.

We think it’s in the nucleus of the neurons.

We haven’t proved that, though.”

This research could have important implications for those with Alzheimer’s disease, Professor Glanzman believes.

If their research is correct, while the synapses are destroyed by the disease, the memories might still be present.

Glanzman continued:

“As long as the neurons are still alive, the memory will still be there, which means you may be able to recover some of the lost memories in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.”

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When you save information digitally, your real memory for that information is worse, but a new study reveals a positive flipside.

Clicking ‘save’ on a digital file makes your memory worse for that information, but improves it for what you learn subsequently, a new study finds.

The trick probably works because taking a photo or saving a file flushes the information out of consciousness, freeing up cognitive resources for the next task.

Dr. Benjamin Storm, who led the study, said:

“We tend to think of forgetting as happening when memory fails, but research suggests that forgetting plays an essential role in supporting the adaptive functioning of memory and cognition.”

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, had participants study a file filled with words they were told to memorise (Storm & Stone, 2014).

Some were told to save the file after studying it, others were not.

They were then given a second file of words to remember.

The results showed that people remembered the words in the second file better when they had saved the first file.

Dr. Storm explained why the trick works:

“The idea is pretty simple: Saving acts as a form of offloading.

By ensuring that certain information will be digitally accessible, we can re-allocate cognitive resources away from maintaining that information and focus instead on remembering new information.”

While saving information makes our memory poorer for that information, at least we know where to find it.

Dr. Storm continued:

“As technology develops, computers and smart phones are making it easier and easier to save information, which seems to have important consequences for the ways in which our memory functions.

By treating computers and other digital devices as extensions of memory, people may be protecting themselves from the costs of forgetting while taking advantage of the benefits.”

Dr. Storm pointed out that forgetting old information may also help us be more creative:

“Coming up with a new idea or solving a problem often requires that we think outside the box, so to speak, and forgetting previous information allows us to do that.

By helping us to reduce the accessibility of old information, saving may facilitate our ability to think of new ideas and solve difficult problems.”

Image credit: A Health Blog

Five-month-olds can remember what they’ve seen when it is paired with this emotion.

Babies can remember what they’ve seen if it is paired with a positive emotion, a new study finds, but nothing otherwise.

The research, carried out by psychologists at Brigham Young University, is the first to look at how being exposed to different emotions affects the memory of infants.

The researchers tested the effect of a positive, negative and neutral tone of voice on which geometric shapes they could remember (Flom et al., 2014).

The five-month-olds in the study obviously couldn’t talk, but their eye gaze was measured to see which way they were looking and for how long.

The infants were tested five minutes after seeing the shapes and one day later — what psychologists consider long-term memory.

The results, published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development, showed that after both five minutes and one day, the infants remembered shapes that were initially paired with a positive voice.

In comparison, they seemed not to remember the shapes paired with neutral or negative voices at all.

Professor Ross Flom, who led the study, said:

“People study memory in infants, they study discrimination in emotional affect, but we are the first ones to study how these emotions influence memory.”

While scientists are not sure why babies remember things paired with positive emotions, they can extrapolate from studies on adults.

Professor Flom explained:

“We think what happens is that the positive affect heightens the babies’ attentional system and arousal.

By heightening those systems, we heighten their ability to process and perhaps remember this geometric pattern.”

Image credit: Paolo Marconi

Study compared the mental effects of aerobic exercise, weight training and balance and co-ordination.

A new study of older people finds that there is no need to follow a special training programme to boost cognitive function.

Any type of exercise improves mental abilities: it doesn’t matter if it’s aerobic or strength or just improving balance and flexibility.

It didn’t even seem to matter if the participants were getting much fitter — as long as they got moving, they got the mental benefits of exercise.

For the research, people between the ages of 62 and 84 were put into three different groups (Berryman et al., 2014).

Two of the groups did strength training and high-intensity aerobic exercise.

A third group carried out activities that trained balance, co-ordination and other gross motor functions.

This third group did activities like throwing balls at targets, learning to juggle and yoga-type stretches.

Although the first two groups were the only ones to get physically fitter, all three groups showed similar benefits to executive function.

Dr. Louis Bherer, one of the study’s authors, explained:

“Our study targeted executive functions, or the functions that allow us to continue reacting effectively to a changing environment.

We use these functions to plan, organize, develop strategies, pay attention to and remember details, and manage time and space.”

Dr. Nicolas Berryman, the study’s lead author, said:

“For a long time, it was believed that only aerobic exercise could improve executive functions.

More recently, science has shown that strength-training also leads to positive results.

Our new findings suggest that structured activities that aim to improve gross motor skills can also improve executive functions, which decline as we age.

I would like seniors to remember that they have the power to improve their physical and cognitive health at any age and that they have many avenues to reach this goal.”

For younger people, it may well be that cardiovascular fitness — the kind you get from things like jogging — is better for your cognitive function.

But this study suggests that for older people, it’s less about the type of activity, and more about getting activity of any kind.

Image credit: A Health Blog