learning and memory

People who show low social engagement over long periods of time often show reductions in cognitive function. Studies of the brain may provide clues about this correlation.

Absence of human contact is associated with declines in cognitive function. But as the COVID-19 pandemic brings concerns about the potential harms of isolation to the fore, researchers are still hunting for concrete evidence of a causal role as well as possible mechanisms.

Honeybees can remember reward-associated odors three days after a single learning experience.

Adult neurogenesis, already appreciated for its role in learning and memory, also participates in mental health and possibly even attention, new research suggests.

Rats and equations help researchers develop a theory of how our brains keep track of when events took place.

Signals from the lateral entorhinal cortex help create “time cells” in the hippocampus, according to some researchers.

Cutting-edge microscopy is revealing how new neurons made in adult mice’s brains tap into existing neuronal connections.

Honeybees can remember reward-associated odors three days after a single learning experience.

Those who had developed PTSD appear to be less able to suppress unwanted memories—traumatic or not—suggesting a role for the general ability to control memory recall in the disorder.

Under constant darkness, Drosophila’s ability to form lasting memories is impaired.

Strategies to make lab animals forget, remember, or experience false recollections probe how memory works, and may inspire treatments for neurological diseases.

The animals develop a new memory that overrides the fearful one by inhibiting the cells that encode the original memory.

Researchers have developed ways to manipulate neurons involved in a particular memory to make mice recall an experience or to remember something that never happened.

A protein present in the ejaculate of male fruit flies activates long-term memory formation in the brains of their female partners.

Juvenile birds learn the length of the sounds in a song from a false memory introduced via optogenetics, instead of from real interactions with a tutor bird.

Offspring of rats exposed to vaporized cannabis had difficulty switching strategies to get a sugar reward, according to a study presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference.

Upping a gene’s expression in rat brains made them better learners and normalized the activity of hundreds of other genes to resemble the brains of younger animals.

In the mantis shrimp brain, scientists uncover mushroom bodies—learning and memory structures typically found in the brains of insects.