Evidence of behavioral tagging in humans. The effect of

BALLARINI, FABRICIO; HIRSCH, IAN; VILLAR, M, EUGENIA; VIOLA, HAYDÉE

Cordoba

Congreso; Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencia; 2013

Evidence of behavioral tagging in humans. The effect of novelty on the formation and persistence of Long Term memory             In previous researches we have shown that rodents under weak training protocols (that otherwise would only induce short term memory) could consolidate a long term memory, provided that the training session occurred close to an unrelated novel experience. This process begins with the setting of a learning tag, established by the weak training and also requiring synthesis of PRPs (Plasticity Related Proteins) induced by the novelty. Hence, an essential question arises: is this Behavioral Tagging (BT) mechanism also involved in humans LTM formation? In order to answer this question, we first focused on elementary school children. With them we intended to find out, if a novel or familiar event exerted a similar effect on LTM (regarding a reading or graphical activity) (cita PlosOne). Our results suggest that the learning task triggers a transient process, enabling the consolidation of that information by the effects of the novel experience. In the present work, we show an analogous promoting effect in high school students: by using different kinds of learning and novelty events. We found memory improvements in the students group which experienced a novel lesson 1 hour before or after the graphical activity (Rey-Osterrieth complex figure performance in adults) or a regular learning in the classroom. This was not appreciated when these were 4 hours apart. Interestingly, our results show that the experience of educationally relevant novel events, can improve LTM (tested 48 hrs and 45 days later) for task the learnt. In conclusion, these experiments performed in students support the idea that BT might be acting in the formation of human memories. This would provide an interesting strategy to boost teaching activities, just by using novel pedagogic tasks to improve memory for those assignments of proven difficult learning and acquisition.