News reports of research into memory March 2004

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March 2004

Music with exercise boosts mental performance

In the first study to look at the combined effects of music and short-term exercise on mental performance, researchers found that listening to music while exercising helped to increase scores on a verbal fluency test among cardiac rehabilitation patients. The study included 33 men and women in the final weeks of a cardiac rehabilitation program. Participants completed a verbal fluency test before and after two separate sessions of exercising on a treadmill. The workouts were scheduled a week apart and lasted about 30 minutes. Participants listened to classical music – Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" – during one of the sessions. Participants reported feeling better emotionally and mentally after working out regardless of whether or not they listened to music. But the improvement in verbal fluency test performance after listening to music was more than double that of the non-music condition.
The report appeared in the November-December 2003 issue of Heart & Lung. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/osu-alm032304.php

Photos facilitate "recovery" of false memories

Another study demonstrating the ease with which people can be persuaded to accept a fabricated childhood memory. A Canadian study found that use of photographs (used by some psychotherapists as memory cues for the "recovery" of patients' possible childhood sexual abuse) resulted in an astounding two-out-of-three participants accepting a concocted false grade-school event as having really happened to them. The study involved 45 first year psychology students being told three stories about their grade-school experiences and asked about their memories of them. Two of the accounts were of real events advised by the participant's parents; the third was fictitious. Participants were encouraged to recall the events through a mix of guided imagery and "mental context re-instatement"--the mental equivalent of putting themselves back in their grade-school shoes. Half of the participants were also given their real grade one class photo. While a quarter or so of the participants without a photo claimed to have some memory of the false event, 67% of those shown a photo claimed some memory.
The report appeared in the March issue of Psychological Science. Full reference
A PDF version of the article can be found at http://web.uvic.ca/psyc/lindsay/cv/index.html#publications
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/nsae-cwb033104.php

Environmental damage to brains of children

A new report suggests that the brains of children in many parts of Europe are suffering greater damage from environmental risks than previously recognized. A meeting in Malta of European delegates preparing for a ministerial conference on environment and health, being held in Budapest in June, were given preliminary results from a comprehensive study on environmental threats to children's health, being conducted by the WHO and the University of Udine, Italy. The full report is to be published at the Budapest conference. The findings suggest lead is the single most important damaging chemical for children. In 2001, the estimated percentage of European children in urban areas with elevated blood levels (above 10 micrograms per decilitre) ranged from 0.1% to 30.2%.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3568939.stm

U.N. prescribes nutrient-fortified foods

A new U.N. survey says the brainpower of many developing countries has diminished because of a shortage of the right vitamins. To fight the problem, the United Nations is prescribing artificially fortified foods: soy sauce laced with zinc, "super salt" spiked with iron, cooking oil fortified with vitamin A. The report claimed a lack of iron lowered children's IQs by an average five to seven points, while a deficiency in iodine cuts it 13 more points. The report was produced by the Micronutrient Initiative and the United Nations Children's Fund.
http://www.micronutrient.org/

Vital role in brain development for the nutrient choline

The nutrient choline is known to play a critical role in memory and brain function by positively affecting the brain's physical development through increased production of stem cells (the parents of brain cells). New research demonstrates that this occurs through the effect of choline on the expression of particular genes. The important finding is that diet during pregnancy turns on or turns off division of stem cells that form the memory areas of the brain. Developing babies get choline from their mothers during pregnancy and from breast milk after they are born. Other foods rich in choline include eggs, meat, peanuts and dietary supplements. Breast milk contains much more of this nutrient than many infant formulas. Choline is a vitamin-like substance that is sometimes treated like B vitamins and folic acid in dietary recommendations.
A choline food database is available at: www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp.
A report on the findings will appear in the April issue of the Journal of Neurochemistry. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/uonc-sdw031604.php

Light drinking during pregnancy may lead to learning and memory deficits in adolescents

The dangers for the developing child of heavy drinking during pregnancy are well-known, but an ongoing longitudinal study of 580 children and their mothers has found that even light to moderate drinking may have significant effects on the cognitive development of the child – effects which show up in adolescents in subtle difficulties with learning and memory, specifically in the auditory/verbal domain.
The study was published in the March issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/ace-ltm030804.php

Deficits associated with prenatal alcohol exposure can be seen as early as infancy

Most of the research on arousal and attention deficits caused by prenatal alcohol exposure has been conducted with children. A new study examined different components of attention through use of heart-rate data collected from six-month-old infants. The findings indicate that slower processing speeds and arousal-regulation problems exist as early as infancy.
The study was published in the March issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/ace-daw030804.php

Prenatal exposure to secondhand smoke increases risk of developmental delay

A new study funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has found that children whose mothers are exposed during pregnancy to second-hand smoke have reduced scores on tests of cognitive development at age two, when compared to children from smoke-free homes. In addition, the children exposed to second-hand smoke during pregnancy are approximately twice as likely to have developmental scores below 80, which is indicative of developmental delay. These differences were magnified for children whose mothers lived in inadequate housing or had insufficient food or clothing during pregnancy. The combined effect results in a developmental deficit of about seven points in tests of cognitive performance.
The study will appear in the May-June issue of Neurotoxicology and Teratology. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/nioe-sse031504.php

Pre-term labor drug sensitizes brain to pesticide injury

A rat study has found that unborn rats exposed to terbutaline - a drug commonly prescribed to halt pre-term labor and stave off premature birth - suffered greater brain cell damage than those not given the drug upon secondary exposure to the common insecticide chlorpyrifos. This suggests that this drug might leave the brains of children susceptible to other chemicals ubiquitously present in the environment, and may help explain earlier suggestions that children whose mothers are administered terbutaline suffer cognitive deficits.
The report appeared in the March 1 issue of Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/dumc-pld033004.php

Visuospatial tasks during trauma may reduce intrusive memories

In three experiments, researchers found that viewers who performed a visuospatial task (tapping out a specified pattern on a hidden keyboard) while watching a 12.5-minute trauma video with five scenes of horrific content suffered fewer intrusive memories in the following week than viewers who performed a verbal task. This may occur because the same types of memory resources may be involved in processing both particular visuospatial tasks and the sensory aspects of traumatic stimuli. On the other hand, verbal distraction – counting down by threes -- was associated with a greater number of subsequent intrusions, suggesting that verbal interference might interfere with processing that helps the viewer make sense of the traumatic images. While more research is needed, this suggests a hopeful new approach to dealing not only with PTSD but also other psychological disorders now thought to involve intrusive imagery, such as worry (generalized anxiety disorder), insomnia, social phobia, agoraphobia, psychosis and others.
The research appeared in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Full reference
(Full text of the article is available at http://www.apa.org/journals/xge/press_releases/march_2004/xge13313.html )
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/apa-vtd030104.php

Losing consciousness helps prevent PTSD

Current thinking holds that traumatic brain injury alone may be sufficient to protect patients from developing posttraumatic stress disorder, but new research suggests this protection extends chiefly to those who lose consciousness (for a significant period) during their ordeal. The study was small and requires replication with a bigger sample.
The study was published in the 9 March issue of BMC Psychiatry. Full reference
The article is available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/4/5/abstract
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/bc-lcc030504.php

"Brain exercises" improves substance-abuse treatment response

"Brain exercises" originally developed for the rehabilitation of head-injury patients have been found to improve the cognitive functioning of individuals in substance-abuse treatment and their commitment to the treatment program. Those who participated in the computer-assisted cognitive rehabilitation exercises stayed in treatment significantly longer than others and twice as many of them "graduated" from treatment. The exercises are designed to improve cognitive functioning with tasks that focus on impaired skills (such as memory and attention) through repetition. Impaired memory and attention have been linked to poorer retention and results in treatment.
The research was reported in the Winter 2003 issue of The Journal of Cognitive Rehabilitation. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/uab-ccr032504.php

Different brain regions for arousing and non-arousing words

An imaging study has found that words representing arousing events (e.g., “rape”, “slaughter”) activate cells in the amygdala, while nonarousing words (e.g., “sorrow”, “mourning”) activated cells in the prefrontal cortex. The hippocampus was active for both type of words. On average, people remembered more of the arousing words than the others, suggesting stress hormones, released as part of the response to emotionally arousing events, are responsible for enhancing memories of those events.
The findings were published in the March 2 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/miot-mlu030104.php

Brain prefers 'automatic pilot' during learning

When people are asked to perform a classification or decision on an object, they become more efficient with repetition of the task. When subject's brains are imaged during such tasks, they show reduced activity -- called "neural priming" -- as the task is learned and performance improves. New research suggests that rather than this being due to the cortex refining its knowledge about the object being learned about (eliminating attributes of the object not needed in the task), the cortex is instead just refining learning of a particular response. Thus we become more rapid with repetition of a decision task simply because we are recovering our prior responses.
In the study, participants were asked to judge whether objects such as an acorn, a stroller, a bicycle pump or a shuttlecock were "bigger than a shoebox." After practicing this task, they were then asked if the objects were "smaller than a shoebox." If the brain's representation of the size of the object is what is being rapidly recovered with repetition, just changing the direction of the question from a 'bigger than' to a 'smaller than' question should not make a difference in performance. If, however, the brain is recovering earlier responses, then changing the direction of the question will make a considerable difference to performance – which it did.
The report appeared in the 18 March issue of Nature. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/du-est030804.php

Memories are harder to forget than recently thought

Previous rodent studies have shown that the process of encoding a memory can be blocked by the use of a protein synthesis inhibitor called anisomycin (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2000-08/NYU-Nnfl-1508100.php ). Experiments with anisomycin helped lead to the acceptance of a theory in which a learned behavior is consolidated into a stored form and that then enters a 'labile' - or adaptable - state when it is recalled. According to these previous studies, the act of putting a labile memory back into storage involves a reconsolidation process identical to the one used to store the memory initially. Indeed, experiments showed that anisomycin could make a mouse forget a memory if it were given anisomycin directly after remembering an event. In a new study, however, researchers have showed that disruption of a "re-remembered" memory was not permanent. Mice demonstrated that they could remember the original learned behavior 21 days later. This research thus casts doubt on the concept of “reconsolidation”, or at least demonstrates that we still have much to learn about this process.
The study was published in the March 30 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/uop-mah031504.php

Norepinephrine important in retrieving memories

In the first description of a molecule implicated in recalling memories as opposed to laying down new memories, researchers have found that the neurotransmitter norepinephrine is essential in retrieving certain types of memories. The studies involved mutant mice lacking norepinephrine and rats treated with drugs that block some norepinephrine receptors (beta blockers). The results run counter to currently held hypotheses that suggest that stress hormones like norepinephrine are responsible for the formation of long-term consolidation of emotional memories, instead finding that norepinephrine was critical for retrieving intermediate-term contextual and spatial memories. The research may help us better understand post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, both of which involve alterations in memory retrieval in different ways.
The research appeared in the April 2 issue of Cell. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-04/uopm-nii033104.php

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