When Learning and Remembering Compete: A Functional MRI Study

Interesting study which has obvious implications for children who may have difficulty listening and expressing themselves with ease. Often when a child has trouble participating in a discussion there can be several issues that may be responsible. Some of the issues that may be causing problems for the student are auditory processing problems, processing speed causing a slow response, language issues, and articulation issues are a few common ones. This information about competing mechanisms of learning and remembering in the brain would explain challenges where other more common issues could not.

Abstract Summary:
This study provides clear evidence for a bottleneck in our memory system between learning new and remembering old information. The ability to continuously learn and remember is usually taken for granted.

Virtually all interactive situations we encounter require concurrent learning and remembering. For example, normal social communication requires that we process the new information that another person is providing. While listening, we are usually already retrieving information in preparation of an appropriate reply. Other examples include driving through an unfamiliar city while interpreting familiar traffic signs, or encountering novel products during shopping while remembering what we need.

Although these examples clearly illustrate the importance of the simultaneous occurrence of learning and remembering, this study shows that remembering and learning compete for resources when both processes happen within a brief period.

The study also examined the neural consequences of the competition between learning and remembering using functional MRI (fMRI). In line with the behavioral competition, the neuroimaging results showed a clear suppression of learning-related brain activity as a result of concurrent remembering. Finally, the study provides evidence that a specific region in the prefrontal cortex can resolve the bottleneck, possibly by allowing rapid switching between learning and remembering.

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000011