INVESTIGADORES
VIOLA Haydee Ana Maria
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Novel classes improve memory in elementary school children: evidence of behavioral tagging
Autor/es:
BALLARINI F; MARTINEZ MC; ALEN N; MONCADA D; DIAZ PEREZ M; H. VIOLA
Lugar:
Florencia
Reunión:
Congreso; 8th IBRO; 2011
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
only by novelty and in a critical time window, our results strongly suggest the
existence of a behavioral tagging mechanism operating also in humans.