Exercising your brain: A review of human brain plasticity and training-induced learning.

Abstract

Human beings have an amazing capacity to learn new skills and adapt to new environments. However, several obstacles remain to be overcome in designing paradigms to broadly improve quality of life. Arguably, the most notable impediment to this goal is that learning tends to be quite specific to the trained regimen and does not transfer to even qualitatively similar tasks. This severely limits the potential benefits of learning to daily life. This review discusses training regimens that lead to the acquisition of new knowledge and strategies that can be used flexibly across a range of tasks and contexts. Possible characteristics of training regimens are proposed that may be responsible for augmented learning, including the manner in which task difficulty is progressed, the motivational state of the learner, and the type of feedback the training provides. When maximally implemented in rehabilitative paradigms, these characteristics may greatly increase the efficacy of training.The ability to learn, or, in other words, to acquire skills and alter behavior as a result of experience, is fundamentally important to the survival of all animals. Humans are certainly no exception; our incredible capacity to learn is certainly one of the principle variables explaining the success of our species. Whereas the term learning is extremely broad, and interesting work exists on its every aspect from the relatively simple (e.g. nonassociative learning) to the much more complex (e.g. social learning), this review focuses mainly on skill learning. This research, which has been predominantly carried out with young adults, provides compelling evidence for common principles of learning and learning transfer. We review this work and its implications for the design of training regimens in older adults.Skill learning is defined here as a change, typically an improvement, in perceptual, cognitive, or motor performance that comes about as a result of training and that persists for several weeks or months, thus distinguishing it from effects related to adaptation or other short-lived effects. Perhaps the most notable finding from the past century or more of research in the field is that humans have demonstrated some amount of learning in virtually every paradigm tested. Evidence for the principle that, given appropriate practice, humans improve on essentially every task, is prevalent throughout the psychology literature, ranging from the domain of perceptual learning (Fahle & Poggio, 2002) to that of motor learning (Karni et al., 1998) and cognitive training (Willis et al., 2006). An important distinction in the field concerns the time course of the learning. Many researchers have differentiated between an early, fast stage of learning that occurs on the order of minutes as the participant becomes familiar with the task and stimulus set and a much slower stage of learning triggered by practice but which requires hours and sometime days to become effective. This distinction is observed in both the perceptual (Karni & Sagi, 1993) and th...

Influence of reward motivation on human declarative memory

“…While in this sense transfer test is a method to verify generalization, in educational psychology, transfer, is the ability to apply learned knowledge to new situations. Transfer from the trained task to other even very similar tasks is generally an exception rather than the rule (Green and Bavelier, 2008).…”

Learning in Later Life: The Perspective of Successful Ageing

“…1, 2015 Impact of learning on mental health through maintenance of cognitive function Age-related cognitive decline is of key concern to contemporary aging research which creates the need for establishing the key dimensions for enhancing the cognitive abilities of elderly adults. Education and learning in older age has been identified as a major protective factor against reductions in cognitive function in a considerable number of studies, showing that cognitive function can be both maintained and enhanced in old age (Rowe & Kahn, 1997;Phelan et al, 2004;Boulton-Lewis et al, 2006;Tam, 2013), and brain aging may be reversed through learning experiences (Merzenich, 2005;Mahncke et al 2006;Green & Bavelier 2008;Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009). Merzenich (2005) has developed a theory that the neuronal structure can be changed by specifically designed mental exercises and has identified a number of strategies to overcome the age-related cognitive decline problems.…”

“…Mahncke et al (2006) point out that substantial improvement in function and/or recovery from losses should be possible using appropriately designed behavioral training paradigms and brain-plasticity-based training program would potentially be applicable to all aging adults with the promise of improving their operational capabilities. Green and Bavelier (2008) have also suggested development of new cognitive interventions that can be effectively applied to compensate for age-related cognitive decline. Park and Reuter-Lorenz (2009) have proposed the scaffolding theory of aging and cognition based on neuroplasticity.…”

Unitization of route knowledge

“…The current lack of transfer may differ from that in related situations, namely, as everything about these overlapping stimuli in the present experiments was identical (e.g., stimuli, location and responses), still the same stimuli were responded to faster in the context of the familiar route versus the novel route. Perhaps transfer would have occurred if the learning procedure varied, and thus item specific information would not have been tied exclusively to a given context, e.g., a given route (Perlman et al, 2015; see also Green, & Bavelier, 2008, for a similar claim). Accordingly if from the beginning of training, turns along a given route are equally traveled in the context of other routes, transfer may be more likely.…”