Driver or passenger? It matters to your brain. A new study from psychology professor Neal Cohen, right, and postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss found that those who have some control over their learning environment do better at remembering what they learned than those who don’t. The study offers a first look at the brain mechanisms that contribute to this phenomenon.
CHAMPAIGN, lll. - Good news for control freaks! New research confirms that having some authority over how one takes in new information significantly enhances one’s ability to remember it. The study, , also offers a first look at the network of brain structures that contribute to this phenomenon.
“Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we’re beginning to understand why,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Neal Cohen , who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss. “Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you’re actively exploring the world.”
The study focused on activity in several brain regions, including the hippocampus, located in the brain’s medial temporal lobes, near the ears. Researchers have known for decades that the hippocampus is vital to memory, in part because those who lose hippocampal function as a result of illness or injury also lose their ability to fully form and retain new memories. But the hippocampus doesn’t act alone. Robust neural connections tie it to other important brain structures, and traffic on these data highways flows in both directions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, which track blood flow in the brain, show that the hippocampus is functionally connected to several brain networks - distinct regions of the brain that work in tandem to accomplish critical tasks.To better understand how these brain regions influence active versus passive learning, Voss designed an experiment that required participants to memorize an array of objects and their exact locations in a grid on a computer monitor. A gray screen with a window in it revealed only one object at a time.
The “active” study subjects used a computer mouse to guide the window to view the objects. “They could inspect whatever they wanted, however they wanted, in whatever order for however much time they wanted, and they were just told to memorize everything on the screen,” Voss said. The “passive” learners viewed a replay of the window movements recorded in a previous trial by an active subject. Then participants were asked to select the items they had seen and place them in their correct positions on the screen. After a trial, the active and passive subjects switched roles and repeated the task with a new array of objects.
» Share this page: