Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Memories.... (again)
Memory is, arguably, the most important non-physical function of the brain. It allows us to learn from experience: that food isn't tasty; that river is too swift to swim; invading Russia
Researchers interested in memory retrieval trained rats to do a water maze task, lesioned their hippocampi, and then tested their memory. The lesions affected learning and memory in interesting ways, which should lead to good follow-up research. I won't bother abstracting it, there's a nice synthesis here.
Another study, which highlights something we all know already (that standardized intelligence/aptitude testing is crap), examined list recall from visual versus aural input modalities. It turns out that recall is highly modality-dependent: the auditory system seems to be naturally 'primed' for sequential memory, whereas the visual system is not. And both seem to be independent of actual linguistic ability.
Researchers interested in memory retrieval trained rats to do a water maze task, lesioned their hippocampi, and then tested their memory. The lesions affected learning and memory in interesting ways, which should lead to good follow-up research. I won't bother abstracting it, there's a nice synthesis here.
Another study, which highlights something we all know already (that standardized intelligence/aptitude testing is crap), examined list recall from visual versus aural input modalities. It turns out that recall is highly modality-dependent: the auditory system seems to be naturally 'primed' for sequential memory, whereas the visual system is not. And both seem to be independent of actual linguistic ability.
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