Reberlab Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning and Memory

Not so much news as random connections from things in the real world to the kinds of things we actively study in the lab.

Brain training in the news

Kati sent a link to a piece in the New Yorker on Anti-Aging games: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/01/30/120130ta_talk_seabrook

Fountain of Youth Dept.
Re-Start
by John Seabrook January 30, 2012

Nolan Bushnell stopped by the office the other day, to play an anti-aging video game. “It’s what I call a ‘looking forward by looking backward’ game,” he said, settling in at the keyboard and loosening up his shoulders. “Meaning that you have to be able to solve a problem using information you received before you were distracted by something else. That’s why older people lose their cars in parking lots. They park, then they go in and shop—that’s the distraction—and then they can’t remember where they put their car.”

Posted by Paul

The Research Works Act

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.

Posted by Danny

Biggest memory experiment ever

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.

Posted by Paul

Avoid flow to learn better?

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).

Posted by Paul

Starcraft in SciAm

This is cool, but I have to say I’m also a little sad that I didn’t write this…

How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/01/how-a-computer-game-is-reinventing-the-science-of-expertise-video/

There’s also some discussion of Starcraft as brain training to boot.

Posted by Paul

Glitch

These guys are building the social networking/gaming environment that would be idea for embedding cognitive training

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/11/glitch-the-battle-to-build-a-massive-multiplayer-game-without-combat.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Tuning the quests and interactions to provide the right level of difficulty and reward was complicated. In beta testing, the development team found that while singing to butterflies was repetitive and boring, people would still sing to butterflies obsessively—because it provided small but guaranteed amounts of experience. The devs tried to balance this by making singing to animals cost energy, but then players simply farmed huge numbers of girly drinks (which made animals interactions cost no energy) and continued to grind the same thing again and again. The girly drinks were then nerfed, and people immediately complained.

“We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”

Just make the grindy things (singing to butterflies) training for WM, attention, executive control, etc.  We can put up with being secretly hated if we are covertly improving their brains.

Posted by Paul

Autism–excess of neurons?

An interesting article came out on the TIME website today, haven’t looked at the actual paper, but seems like a good read.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/09/study-autistic-children-have-too-many-brain-neurons/

Posted by eyarnik

osu!

A new paradigm for studying expertise?  Osu! is a free rhythm game that uses the mouse instead of the keyboard.  It’s pretty hard, but some people get pretty good at it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=mCAE6nzB6LI#t=526s

The game itself is available here: http://osu.ppy.sh/

It has potential value for introspection during skill learning, I think.  If you practice a specific “map” until you beat it, you’ll definitely notice that you’re getting better via skill learning.  But there is also a powerful sense of familiarity — you definitely feel like you recognize the sequence as you repeat it.  The memory system theory question is: is that conscious memory contributing to learning or is it epiphenomenal?

P.S. It’s mildly tricky to get running.  You have to download and install the executable, create an account on their site, then you can browse and download specific maps to try to play.  Also fair warning: much of the music is horrible.

Posted by Paul

Facebook and gray matter density

Haven’t done a Randomness in awhile.  This one is courtesy of Syeda in the Beeman lab:

Facebook Friend Count Linked to Brain Density

(mashable.com reporting from Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences)

The write-up even nicely opens with the correlation/causation problem — do brain differences cause more friends or do more friends cause brain differences?  The areas of gray matter density correlating with number of friends are a collection of temporal lobe regions, mostly non-MTL.  Intriguing but not trivial to make sense of.  I headed to google scholar to see if there was any other work in this area and found a study on Facebook use in TBI patients (http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/02699052.2011.613086).  Interestingly, they also approach Facebook/social networking as a positive thing and with these patients find what we’d expect: some barriers to use related to level of impairment and prior familiarity.

Posted by Paul