IBCN   20355
INSTITUTO DE BIOLOGIA CELULAR Y NEUROCIENCIA "PROFESOR EDUARDO DE ROBERTIS"
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Novel classes improve memory in elementary school children: evidence of behavioral tagging
Autor/es:
BALLARINI, FABRICIO; MARTÍNEZ, MARÍA CECILIA; ALEN, NADIA; MONCADA, DIEGO; DIAZ PEREZ, MAGDALENA; VIOLA, HAYDÉE
Lugar:
Florencia
Reunión:
Congreso; 8th IBRO; 2011
Institución organizadora:
IBRO
Resumen:
Education is the most traditional means with formative effect on the human mind, being learning and memory its fundamental support. For this reason, it is essential to find different strategies to improve the students´ performance. We have previously showed that in rats receiving weak training protocols which only induce short-term memory, a long-term memory (LTM) was promoted if the training session took place close to a novel experience. This process called ?behavioral tagging? begins with the setting of a learning tag established by the weak training and requires synthesis of plasticity-related proteins induced by novelty. The main goal of this work was to study whether performance on cognitive tests could be improved by a novel experience occurring before or after the acquisition session. A short story was read to a total of 800 elementary school students and 24 hours later we evaluated how much they remembered about it. Memory improvements were observed in groups of students who received a novel class 1 hour before or after the reading of the story, but not 4 hours before or after that. Our study was performed in children aged between 7 and 10 years, using two different kinds of novel classes. Interestingly, if the class was not novel, the improvement in LTM was not observed. Because LTM could be improved or promoted only by novelty and in a critical time window, our results strongly suggest the existence of a behavioral tagging mechanism operating also in humans.