There is a "noteworthy" memory study published in Nature last week
that is so significant that the NY Times decided to publish a story
about it: NOTE: the authors all have NYU affiliations but I have
no interaction with them.
Here is the link to the NY Times story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/health/study-shows-brain-stores-seemingly-trivial-memories-just-in-case.html?nlid=389166&src=recpb&_r=0
Here's a quote from the article to provide insight into the
significance of the results:
|The study, done at New York University, had several stages.
|In the first one, the 119 participants sat in front of a computer
|watching photographs scroll by, and categorized each one as
|a tool (hammer, saw, ladder) or an animal (horse, eagle, kangaroo).
|They saw 30 tools and 30 animals, in no particular order.
|
|Five minutes later, the men and women again sat in front of
|the computer, only this time with electrode wires attached to
|one wrist. The research team, led by Joseph Dunsmoor,
|a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive neuroscience, calibrated a
|shock level for each person that was uncomfortable but not painful.
|The participants then categorized a new set of 60 photographs,
|30 tools and 30 animals, in random order. Half of the group
|received a shock most times they saw an animal, and half received
|one most times they saw a tool.
|
|The research team then gave the participants a surprise test,
|measuring how well they remembered all the photographs,
|particularly the first set. The results varied depending on when
|people took the test.
|
|Those who took it right away remembered as many tools as they
|did animals; the shocks had no apparent effect. But those who
|took the test six hours or a day later recalled about 7 percent more
|items from the "shocked" category. For example, they remembered
|more tools if they had been zapped seeing tools.
There are two things that leap out for me:
(1) There was a N=119 participants, suggesting a fair amount of
statistical power, depending upon the effect size that one wants
to detect -- even small effect sizes might be significant.
(2) The participants remembered (recognized, not recalled) only
about 7% more of the pictured items that had been associated with
a shock after a delay of at least six hours (I assume that this was a
completely within-subject design, so the comparison is between
a person's recognition score for unshocked items vs shocked items).
An increase of 7% in correct recognition (if that is the measure; it
could d prime or A prime) is no big deal but I guess that replication
will tell us whether this is a reliable though small effect.
Here is a link to the Nature article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14106.html#affil-auth
I would like to have read the article but trying to get it through the
NYU
library system is not giving me access to it (it provides about 7
different
databases but only 3 allow access to recent articles -- these aren't
working; it could be because I'm trying to access it from off-campus
but that's pretty f'ed up if true).
I'm sure it's available somewhere on the Interweb and I'll eventually
get a
copy but, in the mean time, I really have to wonder about that 7%
correct
recognition increase. Does that mean a participant recognized 1 or 2
more pictures correctly? Doesn't seem to be much of finding to me
but what do I know, right?
Meanwhile, from the "How many geneticists does it take to write a letter
Dept": elsewhere in Nature is a research letter that focuses on how
variations in genetic materials affect human subcortical brain
structures:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14101.html
The answer to the question about how many geneticists is: a lot.
You'll have to click on "show more authors" to see how many.
No, I did not bother to count how many. I'd rather wonder whether
playing with a deflated football is better than playing with an inflated
football. <Insert your own joke about playing with one's balls here>
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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