Reberlab Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning and Memory

Here’s an interesting NY Times Opinion piece on some bill going forward that would stop NIH from requiring grantees to provide copies of their papers.

Tax dollars funding our research is especially touchy in the given economy, so it seems like this would be another bit of negative news to the researchers just wanting to do their jobs.

An email from my friend Jon Simons at Cambridge:

Please excuse the spam, but I’d be very grateful if people would be kind enough to spread the word to their students and colleagues about an online memory experiment we’ve launched this week in collaboration with the Guardian newspaper.  We’re hoping that thousands of people from all over the world will take part.

See press release: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/test-your-memory/

You can test your memory at the Guardian experiment website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/memorystudy

Thanks so much!

Best wishes,
Jon Simons.

I haven’t clicked the links to see what this is about, but in principle I like the idea of large N studies on memory collected online and given who it is from, it’s likely scientifically sensible.

That’s the advice from a blogger/writer who has been studying and writing about how to achieve excellence.  It’s mainly advice passed on from an expert piano player, but it has a certain intuitive appeal to it.

http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/12/23/flow-is-the-opiate-of-the-medicore-advice-on-getting-better-from-an-accomplished-piano-player/

I think the idea comes from the perspective of “deliberate practice” and the idea that practicing that which is too easy (and therefore you experience a flow state during practice) does not lead to improvement.

Can we reconcile this with our idea that practice should maximize dopamine release by successfully overcoming challenges?  I have described that idea previously as training so that you have as much success as possible while also realistically expecting that you might fail.

Perhaps we’d say that the flow state described by the pianist reflects a state of euphoria associated with performing so successfully that you cannot fail?  That would separate the idea of a “flow state” from our idea of dopamine reward release — which is just a rough hypothesis anyway.  Or perhaps the experience of the truly skilled expert is that they need to be challenged with more difficult training tasks to hit the maximal training reward level.  That would account for the pianist’s experience seeing the “mediocre” practicing things that seem too easy as just reflecting the fact that they are less skilled and simpler training tasks are optimal for them.  I wonder if anybody at the Music School here would have any insight on this kind of phenomenon.

In theory, we could test this with the SISL task by comparing sequence learning in conditions where we set the task speed to adaptively keep people at 75% correct or at ~100% correct (then test them under identical conditions).

Bojinov, H., Sanchez, D., Reber, P., Boneh, D., & Lincoln, P.

Cryptographic systems often rely on the secrecy of cryptographic keys given to users. However, many schemes cannot resist coercion attacks where the user is forcibly asked by an attacker to reveal the key. These attacks, known as rubber hose cryptanalysis, are often the easiest way to defeat cryptography. We present a new approach to protecting against coercion attacks using the concept of implicit learning from cognitive psychology. Implicit learning refers to learning of patterns without any conscious knowledge of the learned pattern. We use a carefully crafted computer game to plant a secret password in the participant’s brain without the participant having any conscious knowledge of the trained password. While the planted secret can be used for authentication, the participant cannot be coerced into revealing it since he or she has no conscious knowledge of it. We performed a number of user studies using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to verify that participants can successfully re-authenticate over time and that they are unable to reconstruct or even recognize short fragments of the planted secret.

Sanchez, D.J., Wesley, A.H., & Reber, P.J.

Although implicit skill learning occurs incidentally and without conscious awareness of what is learned, the rate and effectiveness of learning may still be affected by variation in the cognitive state of the learner during practice. Ego depletion theory states that humans possess a limited store of cognitive resources that, when depleted, results in deficits in self-regulation and cognitive control. While the specific mechanism of ego depletion is not known, its effects on processes associated with dopaminergic function suggest the possibility that ego depletion might affect the dopamine-gated plasticity that is hypothesized to support implicit sequential skill learning. In a first experiment this idea was tested using an assessment of pre-experimental depletion given prior to training on the Serial Interception Skill Learning (SISL) task and relative depletion state was found to predict implicit learning rate. In a second experiment, ego depletion was manipulated by having participants complete a depleting task prior to a standard implicit learning protocol. Depleted participants exhibited less learning than did non-depleted controls. In a third experiment, depletion was administered after training and was not found to interfere with skilled performance, suggesting the effect of ego depletion is specific to learning. These results indicate that in both training and educational contexts, ego depletion should be avoided prior to practice to maximize training gains even from rote or repetitive practice.

Submitted to CABN.