PsychSplash Psychology Group

Now referred to as long-term potentiation (LTP), this mechanism has since become the most intensively studied in modern neuroscience,and is widely believed to be the cellular basis of learning and memory, although this is yet to be proven unequivocally.

In the new study, Santiago Canals of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and his colleagues used the same protocol to induce LTP. But while the vast majority of researchers have investigated LTP in slices of hippocampal tissue, this study involved observing LTP in live animals.

This new research provides the first evidence that the local modifications in synaptic connections induced by LTP lead to long-lasting changes in the activity of a diffuse network of brain regions, and even to facilitated communication between the two hemispheres. The fMRI data showed that hippocampal LTP recruits higher order association areas, as well as regions involved in emotions and others subserving different sensory modalities, all of which are known to be involved in memory formation.

Marc G. Berman and colleagues at the University of Michigan wanted to test the effect of a walk’s scenery on cognitive function (Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, 2008; PDF).

In the first of two studies participants were given a 35 minute task involving repeating loads of random numbers back to the experimenter, but in reverse order.

The results showed that people’s performance on the test improved by almost 20% after wandering amongst the trees. By comparison those subjected to a busy street did not reliably improve on the test.

The major finding was that increased working memory capacity following training was associated with changes in brain biochemistry. Specifically, the researchers found changes in the density and binding potential of cortical D1 dopamine receptors in brain regions that are activated during working memory tasks.

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