INVESTIGADORES
VIOLA Haydee Ana Maria
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Evidence of behavioral tagging in humans. The effect of novelty on the formation and persistence of Long Term memory
Autor/es:
BALLARINI F; HIRSCH I; VILLAR ME; VIOLA H
Lugar:
Cordoba
Reunión:
Congreso; Sociedad Argentian de Neurociencias; 2013
Resumen:
In previous researches we have shown that rodents under
weak training protocols (that only induce short term memory) could consolidate
a long term memory (LTM), 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). 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, improved LTM measure
either 48 hrs or 45 days after learning. 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.