Memory

Smartphone app designed by U of T researchers can significantly improve memory recall

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 16:13:24 +0000

Smartphone app designed by U of T researchers can significantly improve memory recall

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 01/16/2023 - 11:13

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Psychology post-doctoral researcher Bryan Hong and Professor Morgan Barense review fMRI scans in the Toronto Neuroimaging Facility (photo by Diana Tyszko)

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Faculty of Arts & Science

Memory

Psychology

Research & Innovation

Startups

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Researchers at the University of Toronto have demonstrated that a new smartphone application helps to significantly improve memory recall, which could prove beneficial for individuals in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of memory impairment.

Dubbed HippoCamera for its ability to mimic the function of the brain’s hippocampus in memory construction and retention, the app enhances the encoding of memories stored in the brain by boosting attention to daily events and consolidating them more distinctly – thus later enabling richer, more comprehensive recall.

In a two-step process, HippoCamera users record a short video of up to 24 seconds of a moment they want to remember with a brief eight-second audio description of the event. The app combines the two elements just as the brain’s hippocampus would, with the video component sped up to mimic aspects of hippocampal function and to facilitate efficient review. Users then replay cues produced by HippoCamera at later times on a curated and regular basis to reinforce the memory and enable detailed recall.

“We found that memories with an associated HippoCamera cue were long-lasting, and that it worked for everyone in the study – healthy older adults, those starting to show cognitive decline and even one case with severe amnesia due to an acquired brain injury,” said study co-author Morgan Barense, a professor in the department of psychology in U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience.

Morgan Barense

“Many months after the initial part of the study ended, and participants had not watched their HippoCamera cues, they were able to recall these memories in rich detail.”

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that regular users of the app were able to recall over 50 per cent more details about everyday experiences that took place as many as six months earlier than if they had only recorded events and never replayed them. The new research suggests that systematic reactivation of memories for recent real-world experiences can help to maintain a bridge between the present and past in older adults and holds promise for people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of memory impairment.

The study also found that reviewing memory cues with HippoCamera resulted in more positive sentiment during later retrieval.

“There’s something about being better able to remember these events that made people feel closer to them and more positive,” said Barense, who is leading the development of the app and is adjunct scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest. “This is a really important finding given what we know about dementia and the fact that positive reminiscence or focusing on positive life events and positive emotions can improve both memory and well-being in dementia.”

The researchers measured study participants’ patterns of brain activity using fMRI, showing that recall-related brain activity in the hippocampus was more distinctive due to HippoCamera use (photo by Diana Tyszko)

For the study, participants recorded unique HippoCamera clips for everyday events that they wanted to remember and subsequently replayed these memory cues approximately eight times over a two-week period in one experiment, and over a 10-week period in a second experiment. The researchers then initiated a cued recall task where they showed the participants their memory cues and asked them to describe everything they could remember about each event.

This was followed by fMRI brain scanning sessions where researchers measured patterns of brain activity while participants saw their cues and completed a memory test. Three months later, after not practising their HippoCamera memories and not having access to the cues, the participants were asked to recall these events a second time.

“On average, we saw on later recall an increase of more than 50 per cent in the amount of rich, detailed information that someone was able to remember about events that happened as many as 200 days ago, which is significant,” said Chris Martin, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Florida State University and lead author of the study. “Memory is truly self-sustaining ⁠– a strong memory cue can bring along another memory, which can feed into another. You just have to focus on the cue in the first place.”

Bryan Hong replays a memory cue captured using HippoCamera, which combines short audio and video clips of an event just as the hippocampus would (photo by Diana Tyszko)

The brain scans showed that replaying HippoCamera memory cues changed the way in which these everyday experiences were coded in the hippocampus, which has a well-established role in storing detailed memories for recent experiences. Recall-related activity in the hippocampus was more distinctive, meaning that HippoCamera replay helps to ensure that memories for different events remain separate from one another in the brain.

“The more detailed recollection seen earlier in the study was associated with more differentiated memory signals in the hippocampus,” said Martin. “That HippoCamera is aiding the hippocampus in distinctly encoding memories, so they do not become confused with one another, explains why users are able to recall past events in such great detail. It’s evidence that rich and detailed memory reactivation promotes memory differentiation at the neural level, and that this allows us to mentally re-experience the past with vivid detail.”

One key factor in HippoCamera’s effectiveness, the researchers say, is the sense of purpose and intention inherent in its use. By its very design, the intervention prompts users to think about what it is that they want to remember and why a particular moment is important to them – and then regularly re-engage with the memories in a meaningful way.

With an easy-to-use interface, HippoCamera is a personalized way to boost recall of daily experiences and enhance activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory (photo courtesy of Dynamic Memory Solutions Inc.)

“Someone who is committed to using HippoCamera is going to go through their lives paying attention to what is happening to them, asking themselves if this is an event they want to capture,” said Barense. “If it is, they’re going to take the time to stop and describe that event. And that act of approaching events in our lives with more attention is going to be good for memory.

“Then later, there’s an intention with how we study those memories, taking the time to review them using optimal learning techniques.”

The researchers note that as people begin to lose their existing memories at any point in their lives, as well as their ability to create new ones, they start to lose their sense of self. As a result, they often become disengaged from the people and events in their lives.

“Memory and our sense of identity are very closely linked,” said Barense, who is receiving support from U of T startup accelerator UTEST to take the app from lab to market. “We understand who we are as people by remembering the things that we’ve done. Our hope with HippoCamera is that by helping people feel closer to these people and events in their lives, we can help give them back their sense of self.”

The research was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, among others.

Researcher uses ‘fuzzy’ AI algorithms to aid people with memory loss

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 14:06:32 +0000

Researcher uses ‘fuzzy’ AI algorithms to aid people with memory loss

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 07/14/2022 - 10:06

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(Image by Eugene Mymrin via Getty Images)

Matthew Tierney

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Our Community

Artificial Intelligence

Brain

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

machine learning

Memory

A new computer algorithm developed by the University of Toronto’s Parham Aarabi can store and recall information strategically – just like our brains.

The associate professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. department of electrical and computer engineering, in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, has also created an experimental tool that leverages the new algorithm to help people with memory loss.

“Most people think of AI as more robot than human,” says Aarabi, whose framework is explored in a paper being presented this week at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference in Glasgow. “I think that needs to change.”

Parham Aarabi

In the past, computers have relied on their users to tell them exactly what information to store. But with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep learning and neural nets, there has been a move toward “fuzzier” approaches.

“Ten years ago, computing was all about absolutes,” says Aarabi. “CPUs processed and stored memory data in an exact way to make binary decisions. There was no ambiguity.

“Now we want our computers to make approximate conclusions and guess percentages. We want an image processor to tell us, for example, that there’s a 10 per cent chance a picture contains a car and a 40 per cent chance that it contains a pedestrian.”

Aarabi has extended this same fuzzy approach to storing and retrieving information by copying several properties that help humans determine what to remember — and, just as critically, what to forget.

Studies have shown that we tend to prioritize more recent events over less recent ones. We also emphasize memories that are more important to us and we compress long narratives to their essentials.

“For example, today I remember that I saw my daughter off to school, I made a promise that I’d pay someone back and I promised that I’d read a research paper,” says Aarabi. “But I don’t remember every single second of what I experienced.”

The capacity to overlook certain information could supercharge existing models of machine learning.

Today, machine learning algorithms trawl through millions of database entries, looking for patterns that will help them correctly associate a given input with a given output. Only after countless iterations does the algorithm eventually become accurate enough to deal with new problems that it hasn’t already seen.

If bio-inspired artificial memory enables these algorithms to give prominence to the most relevant data, they could potentially arrive at meaningful results much more quickly.

The approach could also support tools that process natural language to help people with memory loss keep track of key information.

Aarabi and his team have set up such a tool using a simple email-based interface. It reminds participants of important information based on algorithmic priority and a relevant index of keywords.

“Ultimately, it’s geared to people with memory loss,” Aarabi says. “It helps them remember things in a way that’s very human, very soft, without overwhelming them. Most task management aids are too complicated and not useful in these circumstances.”

The demo is free and available for anyone to play with; simply send an email to mem@roya.vc for instructions.

“I’ve been using it myself,” says Aarabi. “The goal is to put the demo in people’s hands – whether they’re dealing with significant memory degradation or just everyday pressures – and see what feedback we get. The next steps would be to build partnerships in health care to test in a more comprehensive way.”

“These days, AI applications are increasingly found in many human-centred fields,” says Professor Deepa Kundur, chair of the department of electrical and computer engineering. “Professor Aarabi, by researching ways to better integrate AI with these ‘softer’ areas, is looking to ensure that the potential of AI is fully realized in our society.”

Aarabi says that this algorithm is just the beginning.

“Biologically inspired memory may very well take AI a step closer to human-level capabilities.”

U of T's Marilyn Smith showed memories can be faulty – with implications for courtrooms everywhere

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 20:52:58 +0000

U of T's Marilyn Smith showed memories can be faulty – with implications for courtrooms everywhere

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 01/20/2020 - 15:52

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Marilyn Smith at Elbow Falls near Bragg Creek, Alta. in 2010 (photo courtesy Ilyse Smith)

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Marilyn Smith was an expert on cognition and memory whose work at the University of Toronto shed light on bilingualism, hypnosis, trauma and the eyewitness testimony delivered in courtrooms. She also managed to become a skilled artist and sculptor – all while balancing a demanding career with family life.

A professor of psychology at U of T Scarborough for almost four decades, Smith first arrived at the university in 1966, became a full professor in 1977 and retired in 2004. She died on Nov. 8 at the age of 77 after fighting pancreatic cancer.

Fergus Craik, a professor emeritus of psychology at U of T, describes Smith as a “very nice person who was extremely well-liked by everyone.”

She had a good sense of work-life balance, which was unusual for successful academics, he says.

“Although she was enthusiastic and committed to her work, she was also very committed to her family, and indeed to social causes.”

Smith (left) began her academic career looking at basic processes of cognition, including how people make decisions based on simple information. But she soon expanded far beyond that, writing and co-authoring papers that examined how bilingual people handle language, as well as the earliest fragmented memories of childhood and people’s memories surrounding traumatic events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She found that those memories were not particularly accurate and faded over time.

One of her greatest contributions was her work on eyewitness testimony in legal trials, according to Colin MacLeod, a former colleague at U of T Scarborough who is now a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo. Smith wrote an influential paper published in Psychological Bulletin in 1983 that showed efforts to enhance the recollections of witnesses using hypnosis were ineffective. Despite attempts to use hypnosis to “refresh” the memories of witnesses to a crime, “controlled laboratory studies have consistently failed to demonstrate any hypnotic memory improvement,” she said.

Smith’s work “pointed to some of the problems with thinking of hypnosis as a key to memory; that it can’t be relied on,” MacLeod said.

More broadly, Smith’s work uncovered evidence that many memories are faulty. In a 1997 article in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, she wrote that while “the model of memory held by many therapists is that memory is like a video-recorder, keeping a permanent record of all experiences,” the model she adhered to, as a cognitive psychologist, was that memory “is not a passive recording of information, but an active, re-constructive process.”

In addition to her research, Smith also revelled in teaching and gladly conducted the introductory psychology course for undergraduates, according to MacLeod. Many professors were not interested in taking on that task, “but she thought that was an important course to teach,” he says, and she kept it up for her entire U of T career.

Joan Foley, former principal of U of T Scarborough, describes Smith as a “devoted and effective teacher” and says that “students gravitated to her courses for all the right reasons.”

Among Smith’s innovations, Foley says, was a fourth-year seminar course on psychology and the law. It proved so popular that the format had to be altered to accommodate 50 senior undergraduate students instead of the 20 that had been planned. The course looked at how perception, memory, attention and decision-making influence legal processes. It also covered topics related to eyewitness testimony, lie detectors and hypnosis.

Marilyn Chapnik was born in March 1942 in downtown Toronto, the second of three children of Polish immigrants Lily and Chiam Chapnik. She went to Clinton Street Public School and then to Harbord Collegiate before working part time at Woolworths and Honest Ed’s. A strong student, she was accepted into pre-medical studies at U of T.

It was at U of T that she met her first husband, Larry Smith. Since Larry was heading to Harvard University for graduate work, Marilyn decided to transfer to psychology in order to attend graduate school in Boston. She tried to get in to Brandeis University, but found the private research university to be unwelcoming to women; she ended up with a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she completed her PhD.

After finishing their programs, the couple returned to Canada. Smith began her teaching and research career at Scarborough College (now U of T Scarborough) in 1966.

Marilyn Smith (centre back row) and extended family in a photo from November 2018 (photo courtesy Ilyse Smith)

Smith had three daughters, Cynthia, Ilyse and Natalie. Natalie recalls the appeal of some of the material from her mother’s studies on perception.

“I remember going to her office, and she would have big boards with different optical illusions on them. As a kid that was the part that I latched on to.”

Ilyse, meanwhile, remembers experiments on the perception of colour. The word “green” might confusingly be written in purple ink, for example, and the test was to see how quickly a subject could name the proper printed colour. “It was fun to take some of those tests and participate in some of the experimental work she was doing,” Ilyse says. “It was quite relatable. She had a fantastic way, as a parent and as a professor, of taking the theoretical contents and making them very accessible.”

Her children say that while Smith was dedicated to her work, it didn’t take over her life and she was still able to make time for family, friends and hobbies. She took up an interest in sculpting and painting, producing impressive interpretive works that she gave away. She played tennis, was an avid bridge player, and was an accomplished cook and baker.

“She always prided herself broadly in life on her efficiency, and she brought that same mind-set to the way she cooked,” Ilyse says.

In 1986 Marilyn and Larry divorced, and nine years later she remarried to David Kendal. The couple skied and travelled together, spending time at a cottage and at a condo in Florida.

Marilyn Smith and David Kendal visit India in this undated photo (photo courtesy Ilyse Smith)

In a eulogy for his wife, Kendal said she was sometimes described as blunt and direct – words that imply there was a sharp edge to her.

“This was not the case with Marilyn,” he said. “Yes, she always told it like it was, and she certainly didn’t sugarcoat things, but she did it with such humanity. You always felt love and support and you always knew where you stood.”

After her retirement from U of T in 2004, Smith took up another career as an arbitrator, working for Ontario’s Workplace Safety Insurance Appeals Tribunal and travelling across the province for hearings. She retired as vice-chair of that organization just two years ago.

Her friend Joan Grusec, a retired U of T psychology professor, says Smith had strong opinions and liked to offer advice, but she was always respectful and genuinely wanted to help people. She was also very collaborative, in her academic research and her personal life. “She was a catalyst,” Grusec says. “She was good at organizing people and getting them together to produce a good product.”

Grusec visited Smith just a few days before her death, and says “we had a great conversation about the old times and present issues.”

Marilyn Smith leaves behind her brother Jerry and sister Donna, husband David Kendal, daughters Cynthia, Ilyse and Natalie, stepsons Dorian and Aaron, as well as 12 grandchildren.

Neuroscientist Graham Collingridge is new director of U of T's Tanz Centre

noreen.rasbach — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 04:00:00 +0000

Neuroscientist Graham Collingridge is new director of U of T's Tanz Centre noreen.rasbach Tue, 09/17/2019 - 00:00

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Professor Graham Collingridge was one of three recipients of The Brain Prize in 2016, the world’s most prestigious neuroscience award

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Professor Graham Collingridge, a world-renowned expert in learning and memory, has taken over as the new director of the Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Collingridge works in the area of synaptic plasticity, which is considered the neural basis of learning and memory. His research identifies the molecules and mechanisms in the brain that underlie learning and memory to determine how errors in the process of brain cell signalling and flexibility contribute to major brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and fragile X syndrome.

In 2016, he was one of three recipients of The Brain Prize, considered the world’s most prestigious neuroscience award, bestowed by the Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark. The award recognizes Collingridge’s research into “long-term potentiation,” a model for understanding how memories form. Earlier this year, Collingridge was appointed commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to biomedical science.

“We are so pleased to have attracted someone of Graham’s calibre to lead the Tanz Centre,” says Professor Trevor Young, dean of the Faculty of Medicine. “His deeply impressive body of research into the neuroscience of learning and memory and its role in brain disorders holds great promise in helping millions of people affected by Alzheimer’s and other devastating neurological conditions.”

Under the direction of Dr. Peter St George-Hyslop, who served as director from 1990 to 2019, the Tanz Centre has become a global leader in neurodegenerative disease research, transforming our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, prion diseases and other neurodegenerative conditions.

“Peter is a giant in the field of neuroscience,” says Collingridge. “When he began his pioneering research into Alzheimer’s in the 1980s, the disease was little understood. Today, thanks to Peter’s leadership and the Tanz Centre’s approach to pursuing basic scientific discoveries and translating these into therapies, we are able to more definitively diagnose and offer better treatment options to those suffering from these dreadful disorders of the central nervous system.”

Collingridge and his team hope to build on the Tanz Centre’s success by focusing on promoting excellence in research and fostering collaborations withinthe centre, across the Toronto Academic Health Science Network (TAHSN), and internationally.

“My first goal is to maintain and build upon the scientific excellence at the Tanz Centre by defining long-term objectives and securing the funding to bring even more outstanding investigators to work here,” says Collingridge. “Neurodegenerative disease is a huge problem facing people all over the world, and trying to understand the root causes is best tackled with collaborative, multinational efforts. Here in Toronto and Canada, we are extremely well positioned to do just that.”

From the outset, philanthropy has played an essential role in establishing and supporting the Tanz Centre and the leading researchers who work there.

After witnessing his mother Gertrude suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, Mark Tanz was determined to speed the progress of Canada’s research efforts to address the debilitating condition. In 1987, he donated $3.4 million to help establish the Tanz Centre. Since that time, he has contributed an additional $6.1 million to support the Centre.

Jacqueline and Mark Tanz

More recently, the Tanz Centre once again benefited from the support of a visionary group of donors, including a $2-million gift from the Krembil Foundation to establish the Krembil Family Chair in Alzheimer’s Research, to be held by Collingridge as the centre’s director. A commitment of $1.5-million from Mark Tanz’s son, Stuart Tanz, will provide critical support for the Director’s Priority Fund.

Stuart Tanz, who recently assumed his father’s role as chair of the Tanz Centre steering committee, says it’s a great honour to continue his father’s legacy. “It is enormously gratifying and a great privilege to represent my family and fulfil my father’s vision to boost global research and education in neurodegenerative disease,” he says.

Mark Krembil, president and CEO of the Krembil Foundation, who also serves on the board of Brain Canada, U of T’s Governing Council and on the Tanz Centre steering committee, believes that groundbreaking discovery requires both recognition and support.

“We have great faith in Professor Collingridge’s ability to oversee the exciting next chapter of the Tanz Centre story,” he says. “Our combined support was our way to ensure the centre remains at the forefront of international efforts to untangle the brain’s mysteries.”

This generous donor support that led to bringing Collingridge to the Tanz Centre will enable the centre and its researchers to harness more effectively the knowledge and resources needed to drive discovery.

“It is an incredible honour to take over the helm of such an outstanding research centre as the Tanz,” says Collingridge. “Few places worldwide are as well positioned as the University of Toronto to lead the global effort to understand, treat and prevent these complex neurodegenerative conditions. I look forward to building our network of researchers, and to the continued support of our community to help us make significant progress in such a socio-economically important field.”

U of T researchers peer inside the mind of the worm for clues on how memories form

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:10:27 +0000

U of T researchers peer inside the mind of the worm for clues on how memories form

noreen.rasbach Wed, 02/20/2019 - 12:10

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By studying worms, PhD student Daniel Merritt aims to uncover the cells and molecules behind learning and memory (photo by Jovana Drinjakovic)

Jovana Drinjakovic

Topic

Breaking Research

Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research

Graduate Students

Memory

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

Try as you might, some events cannot be remembered. Known in psychology as memory blocking, the phenomenon has remained elusive since first described more than half a century ago. Now, University of Toronto researchers have found that blocking is not due to problems with forming memories, as previously thought, but with memory recall – in worms at least.

By studying this process in the C. elegans worm, a creature only one millimetre long but whose biology has been studied so extensively that the position of all of its 302 nerve cells in the body is known, the researchers think they’ll be able to pinpoint the cells and molecules at play during learning and memory.

The findings are described in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Memory blocking, also known as Kamin blocking, was first described in rats in the 1960s by the psychologist Leon Kamin at McMaster University. It occurs when an animal that has already learned to respond to a cue – a sound, for example – cannot learn to respond to another cue when it is presented at the same time as the learned sound.

“Suppose you grew up hearing ice cream trucks playing a song and hearing that song, even when you can’t see the truck, makes you think of ice cream,” explains Daniel Merritt, who led the study as part of his doctoral research in the group of Derek van der Kooy, a professor in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Molecular Research and U of T’s department of molecular genetics.

“One day, the ice cream truck owners decide to add a spinning green light to the roof of the truck, so that even people who are hard of hearing can see them. Kamin blocking predicts that you won't learn to associate spinning green lights with ice cream, because the ice cream truck song already fully predicts the delicious treat in store for you.”

Kamin blocking is thought to be a key way in which humans learn by focusing on novelty. It led to a well-established idea that to learn about an experience, it has to carry with it an element of surprise. Problems with blocking are pronounced in people with schizophrenia, which is thought to decrease selectivity in attention.

The process, however, has been difficult to study in granular detail in the mammalian brain due to its complexity and lack of molecular tools.

“Being able to fully describe the molecular changes that are going on in memory is enormously appealing, but human memory is too ephemeral and nebulous to pin it down,” says Merritt. “But by studying it in worms, we are really making a lot of headway in figuring out exactly what is going on when memories are formed and retrieved in a molecule by molecule fashion.”

This is thanks to a vast genetic and molecular toolbox that are available to researchers working with C. elegans. But first, Merritt had to establish that memory blocking occurs in worms, which has not been studied before.

To do this, he trained the worms to associate hunger with either the taste of salt or the smell of benzaldehyde, which gives almonds that whiff of sweetness. Unlike untrained worms, which find both substances attractive, trained worms develop a strong dislike for them and crawl away.

Next, Merritt gave the benzaldehyde-trained worms benzaldehyde together with salt. When he then exposed the worms to salt alone, they still crawled toward it. The same was true when salt-trained worms experienced salt together with benzaldehyde – they continued to like almond smell. Whichever cue came second, and in conjunction with the first one, was blocked, similar to what happens in rats and humans.

To probe deeper into how blocking works, Merritt repeated the experiment with worms expressing a protein called EGL-4 that was labelled with a green fluorescent molecule to make it visible.

The EGL-4 protein is present in a single olfactory nerve cell in the worm’s head and its movement inside that cell is required for benzaldehyde starvation learning. To Merritt’s surprise, the protein shifted its position during benzaldehyde blocking the same way it did during normal learning. This suggests that the memory of disliking benzaldehyde had formed but could not be retrieved – the worm forgot about it.

“This is interesting because it contradicts the classic interpretation of blocking where you need an element of surprise or you don’t bother remembering the second association,” says Merritt. “Our data shows that the memory is formed but it’s the expression of behaviour that’s suppressed somehow.”

The effect of blocking lasts about four hours. What goes on in the mind of the worm during that time?

“That’s the big question,” says Merritt, who is now working to uncover parts of the worm brain that help integrate salt and benzaldehyde learning responses. “I’ll let you know in four years’ time when I’m done with my PhD.”

Funding for the project was provided by the National Science and Engineering Research Council.

Why forgetting is really important for memory: U of T research

lanthierj — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 18:58:15 +0000

Why forgetting is really important for memory: U of T research

lanthierj Wed, 06/21/2017 - 14:58

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New research shows the role of forgetting information may be just as important as remembering (all photos by Ken Jones)

Don Campbell

Author legacy

Don Campbell

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Hospital for Sick Children

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“The point of memory is not being able to remember who won the Stanley Cup in 1972”

The prevailing idea in neurobiology when it comes to memories has been that remembering information is king.

But according to researchers from the University of Toronto and The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), the role of forgetting certain information may be just as important.

“The real goal of memory is to optimize decision-making,” says U of T Scarborough Assistant Professor Blake Richards, author of a new review study focusing on the role forgetting information plays in memory.

“It’s important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses on the stuff that’s going to help make decisions in the real world.”

Neurobiological research on memory has tended to focus on the cellular mechanisms involved in storing information, known as persistence, but much less attention has been paid to those involved in forgetting, also known as transience. It’s often been assumed that an inability to remember comes down to a failure of the mechanisms involved in storing or recalling information.

“We find plenty of evidence from recent research that there are mechanisms that promote memory loss, and that these are distinct from those involved in storing information,” says co-author Paul Frankland, U of T associate professor and senior scientist of neurosciences and mental health at SickKids.

Their research is already making headlines around the world.

Read The Independent

Read The Verge

One recent study in particular done by Frankland’s lab showed that the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus seems to promote forgetting. This was an interesting finding since this area of the brain generates more cells in young people. The research explored how forgetting in childhood may play a role in why adults typically do not have memories for events that occurred before the age of four years old.

So why do our brains spend so much energy storing memories, but also spend so much energy trying to forget information?

Richards says there are two very good reasons why you may want to forget at least some of the information you come across. For one, in a constantly changing world old information becomes outdated and not as important to remember.

“If you’re trying to navigate the world and your brain is constantly bringing up multiple conflicting memories, that makes it harder for you to make an informed decision.”

The other important reason reflects a concept used in models for artificial intelligence known as regularization. This principle aims to get computer models to learn how to make generalizations based on large amounts of data. In order to do this, there must be some forgetting of details in the data involved in order to prioritize the core information that is necessary for decisions.

“The point of memory is to make you an intelligent person who can make decisions”

The article, which is published in the journal Neuron, was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), a 2016 Google Faculty Research Award and a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) grant. Richards and Frankland are also supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) as an Associate Fellow and Senior Fellow, respectively.

The big take-away from recent neurobiological research on memory is that the best thing for storing memories is to not memorize absolutely everything, notes Richards. If you’re trying to make a decision it will be impossible to do so if your brain is constantly being bombarded with useless information.

“We always idealize the person who can smash a trivia game, but the point of memory is not being able to remember who won the Stanley Cup in 1972,” he says.

“The point of memory is to make you an intelligent person who can make decisions given the circumstances, and an important aspect in helping you do that is being able to forget some information.”

(Below: Assistant Professor Blake Richards)

Read about more memory research at U of T

Studying during reading week? U of T researcher says focus on large amounts of info for short intervals

ullahnor — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 21:33:37 +0000

Studying during reading week? U of T researcher says focus on large amounts of info for short intervals

ullahnor Tue, 02/21/2017 - 16:33

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As you're studying this reading week, findings from a U of T psychology researcher may help (photo by Jason Krygier-Baum)

Carla DeMarco

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Carla DeMarco

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Keisuke Fukuda's theory was born out of learning English in high school when he would train himself to look at hundreds of words for a short duration, to help learn more effectively in less time

Here’s a study tip for reading week: focus on larger amounts of information, for shorter bits of time.

That can be more effective than mulling over smaller amounts of material for longer durations, says Keisuke Fukuda, assistant professor of psychology at U of T Mississauga.

As part of an experimental study in his lab, he presented individual pictures to participants for 100 milliseconds and had them think about the picture for 500 milliseconds.

Then, Fukuda (pictured left) showed the picture for the same amount of time but had them think about it for about three seconds.

“I compared which one leads to better learning, and it’s the one that had a shorter amount of study time, each time,” he says.

Currently, his research has a two-part focus.

One involves “reading” the mind to understand it better, explore the capacity for a significant amount of memory storage and why that memory sometimes fails us. The second is “leading” the mind to make it function more efficiently and improve our ability to learn and retain information.

To do this, Fukuda uses scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) technology with a fabric “beanie” cap that has small, flat metal discs (electrodes) embedded in it. The electrodes monitor electrical activity in the brain while participants are asked to do various memory-related tasks in a controlled setting.

For example, in one study the participant is shown several pictures of different objects and is asked to remember all the details in the picture. Fukuda says this mimics a lot of the visual information we encounter and need to remember on a daily basis, such as where we parked our car or where we put our keys.

Once the stimuli are presented to participants, they will retain some details but forget others, and Fukuda will review the brain wave data collected during the study to see what was going on in the brain that led to successful encoding and remembering.

Fukuda is also interested in finding out if there are side effects to trying to improve memory.

Though recollections from our younger years can sometimes be a bit murky, Fukuda remembers quite clearly when he first got interested in memory research as an adolescent.

“I was a struggling high school student, and I hated how horrible my memory is, especially for something that I am not really interested in,” says Fukuda.

“I went to high school in Japan where you don’t have many electives, so you have a fixed schedule with math for two hours, classical Japanese, etc. But to get into college to do what I wanted to do, I knew I would have to put in a lot of time studying hard, though I didn’t want to. I thought I should focus on a more efficient way to study, and in order to figure that out, I needed to know how memory works.”

Fukuda says his short-versus-long-study theory was also born out of his learning English in high school, when he would train himself to look at hundreds of words for a short duration, maybe just a second or shorter, to help learn more effectively in less time.

“So that’s how I got into this business – as a lazy student,” he says with a laugh.

Higher-income students have an edge when it comes to working memory, experts at U of T, MIT and Harvard say

lavende4 — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 12:06:17 +0000

Higher-income students have an edge when it comes to working memory, experts at U of T, MIT and Harvard say

lavende4 Wed, 07/20/2016 - 08:06

Cutline

Psychology professor Amy Finn: lower-income students tested have less working memory capacity than their higher-income peers (Diana Tyszko photo)

Peter Boisseau

Author legacy

Peter Boisseau

Topic

Breaking Research

Faculty of Arts & Science

Psychology

income inequality

Research

Research & Innovation

Memory

Subheadline

“Now that we’ve shown this, we might be doing something which is important along the way to helping lower-income students succeed”

University of Toronto and MIT researchers have discovered important differences between lower-income and higher-income children in their ability to use “working memory,” a key brain function responsible for everything from remembering a phone number to doing math in your head.

Using functional MRI (fMRI) to measure and map the brain activity of a group of middle-schoolers, the researchers – working in collaboration with Harvard University – were able to physically document that the lower-income students tested had less working memory capacity than their higher-income peers.

The results of their study were published in the July 19^th edition of Developmental Science.

“It’s never been shown before that lower-income children have this qualitatively different brain response for this very basic ability that is essential to almost all cognition,” says the study’s lead researcher, Amy Finn of U of T’s department of psychology.

Finn said researchers went a step further and also demonstrated these differences in working memory had an impact on academic measures of achievement – in this case a standards-based math test – collected from the schools of the students who were examined.

The researchers say it is a major step toward understanding the neuroscience of the income-achievement gap, and although by no means a complete explanation, is also significant because it links brain functions to academic test scores.

“We knew that there were differences in the neural structure of children from lower-income versus higher-income families, but we didn’t know if that really mattered for solving problems,” says Finn.

“Now that we’ve shown this, we might be doing something which is important along the way to helping lower-income students succeed.”

All 67 students tested for the study were enrolled in either the eighth or seventh grades in schools in the Boston area and recruited through advertisements and after-school programs. They were also ethnically diverse, and with a roughly equal number of boys and girls.

In the study, researchers focused on regions of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, which are important for high-level functions.

They observed that the high-income students largely kept this region of the brain in reserve until the tasks began to get more difficult, but the lower-income children relied on it more often and to a greater extent than higher-income children, even for relatively simple problems.

That suggests there is a difference in how lower-income children to tap into their working memory – which is how the brain organizes and holds information in mind that it can’t immediately see, says Finn.

Finn says she’s concerned people will interpret the data to conclude that these physical differences between the brains of lower-income and higher-income children are somehow hard-wired. Nothing could be further from the truth, she says.

“The brain is a very plastic organ, and all of this can be changed with the right kind of training and better opportunities,” says Finn. “Just because we’re observing this in the brain, doesn’t mean it is set in stone.”

Finn says some of the differences had probably never been observed before because of another kind of gap – an inherent bias in the income level of the populations researchers normally test.

Most cognitive neural science is conducted on people who are from middle and upper- middle class backgrounds because it’s less expensive to study populations near the university than to reach out to lower-income communities, says Finn.

While the study didn’t measure environmental factors, lower-income status is also related to such things as more chronic stress, Finn notes.

“No matter the reason, it doesn’t change the fact that their working memory is qualitatively different.”