spatial

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

Video games may help visuospatial processing and multitasking

Another study has come out showing that expert video gamers have improved mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and multitasking skills. The researchers conclude that training with video games may serve to reduce gender differences in visual and spatial processing, and some of the cognitive declines that come with aging.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/afps-rsa121709.php

The limited nature of the 'Mozart Effect'

The so-called ‘Mozart effect’ (which is far more limited than commonly reported in the popular press, and which argues that listening to Mozart can temporally improve spatial abilities, such as mental rotation) has been found in some studies but not in others. Now a study of 50 musicians and 50 non-musicians may explain the inconsistent results. The study found that only non-musicians had their spatial processing skills improved by listening to Mozart — partly because the musicians were better at the mental rotation task to start with. The effect may have to do with non-musicians processing music and spatial information in the right hemisphere, while musicians tend to use both hemispheres. The effect may also be restricted to right-handed non-musicians — all the participants were right-handed, and left-handed people are more likely to process information in both hemispheres. And finally, the effect may be further restricted to some types of spatial task — the present study used the same task as originally used. So, what we can say is that right-handed non-musicians may temporarily improve their mental rotation skills by listening to Mozart.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/news/mozart-effect-real-for-some-1394

Meditation technique can temporarily improve visuospatial abilities

And continuing on the subject of visual short-term memory, a study involving experienced practitioners of two styles of meditation: Deity Yoga (DY) and Open Presence (OP) has found that, although meditators performed similarly to nonmeditators on two types of visuospatial tasks (mental rotation and visual memory), when they did the tasks immediately after meditating for 20 minutes (while the nonmeditators rested or did something else), practitioners of the DY style of meditation showed a dramatic improvement compared to OP practitioners and controls. In other words, although the claim that regular meditation practice can increase your short-term memory capacity was not confirmed, it does appear that some forms of meditation can temporarily (and dramatically) improve it. Since the form of meditation that had this effect was one that emphasizes visual imagery, it does support the idea that you can improve your imagery and visual memory skills (even if you do need to ‘warm up’ before the improvement is evident).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427131315.htm
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-04/afps-ssb042709.php

Why it’s so hard to disrupt your routine

New research has added to our understanding of why we find it so hard to break a routine or overcome bad habits. The problem lies in the competition between the striatum and the hippocampus. The striatum is involved with habits and routines, for example, it records cues or landmarks that lead to a familiar destination. It’s the striatum that enables you to drive familiar routes without much conscious awareness. If you’re travelling an unfamiliar route however, you need the hippocampus, which is much ‘smarter’.  The mouse study found that when the striatum was disrupted, the mice had trouble navigating using landmarks, but they were actually better at spatial learning. When the hippocampus was disrupted, the converse was true. This may help us understand, and treat, certain mental illnesses in which patients have destructive, habit-like patterns of behavior or thought. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, and drug addiction all involve abnormal function of the striatum. Cognitive-behavioral therapy may be thought of as trying to learn to use one of these systems to overcome and, ultimately, to re-train the other.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/yu-ce102008.php

More light shed on how episodic memories are formed

A rat study has revealed more about the workings of the hippocampus. Previous studies have identified “place cells” in the hippocampus – neurons which become more active in response to a particular spatial location. Activity in the hippocampus while rats searched for food in a maze where the starting and ending point was varied, has found that, while some cells signaled location alone, others were also sensitive to recent or impending events – i.e., activation depended upon where the rat had just been or where it intended to go. This finding helps us understand how episodic memories are formed – how, for example, a spatial location can trigger a reminder of an intended action at a particular time, but not others.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-12/msh-ta121503.php

More learned about how spatial navigation works in humans

Researchers monitored signals from individual brain cells as patients played a computer game in which they drove around a virtual town in a taxi, searching for passengers who appeared in random locations and delivering them to their destinations. Previous research has found specific cells in the brains of rodents that respond to “place”, but until now we haven’t known whether humans have such specific cells. This study identifies place cells (primarily found in the hippocampus), as well as “view” cells (responsive to landmarks; found mainly in the parahippocampal region) and “goal” cells (responsive to goals, found throughout the frontal and temporal lobes). Some cells respond to combinations of place, view and goal — for example, cells that responded to viewing an object only when that object was a goal.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-09/uoc--vgu091003.php