Working memory training makes mice smarter

March, 2010

A mouse study has found working memory training improved their proficiency on a wide range of cognitive tests, and helped them better retained their cognitive abilities into old age.

A study in which 60 young adult mice were trained on a series of maze exercises designed to challenge and improve their working memory ability (in terms of retaining and using current spatial information), has found that the mice improved their proficiency on a wide range of cognitive tests, and moreover better retained their cognitive abilities into old age.

Reference: 

Related News

A study of 265 New York City minority children has found that those born with higher amounts of the insecticide chlorpyrifos had lower IQ scores at age 7.

Research has shown that people are generally poor at predicting how likely they are to remember something.

Comparison of young adults (mean age 24.5) and older adults (mean age 69.1) in a visual memory test involving multitasking has pinpointed the greater problems older adults have with multitasking.

Following earlier research suggesting mood affects attention, a new study tries to pin down exactly what it’s affecting.

A study involving 125 younger (average age 19) and older (average age 69) adults has revealed that while younger adults showed better explicit learning, older adults were better at implicit learning. Implicit memory is our unconscious memory, which influences behavior without our awareness.

Readers of my books and articles will know that

In the first of three experiments, 132 students were found to gesture more often when they had difficulties solving mental rotation problems.

We’ve all experienced the fading of our ability to concentrate when we’ve been focused on a task for too long. The dominant theory of why this should be so has been around for half a century, and describes attention as a limited resource that gets ‘used up’.

A link between positive mood and creativity is supported by a study in which 87 students were put into different moods (using music and video clips) and then given a category learning task to do (classifying sets of pictures with visually complex patterns).

A

Pages

Subscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest health newsSubscribe to Latest news
Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.