June 27, 2011
A little practice can change the brain in a lasting way: study
Hamilton, Ont. June 27, 2011—A little practice goes a long way, according to researchers at McMaster University, who have found the effects of practice on the brain have remarkable staying power.
The study, published this month in the journal Psychological Science, found that when participants were shown
visual patterns—faces, which are highly familiar objects, and abstract patterns, which are much less frequently
encountered—they were able to retain very specific information about those patterns one to two years later.
“We found that this type of learning, called perceptual learning, was very precise and long-lasting,” says Zahra
Hussain, lead author of the study who is a former McMaster graduate student in the Department of Psychology,
Neuroscience & Behaviour and now a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. “These long-lasting
effects arose out of relatively brief experience with the patterns – about two hours, followed by nothing for
several months, or years.”
Over the course of two consecutive days, participants were asked to identify a specific face or pattern from a
larger group of images. The task was challenging because images were degraded—faces were cropped, for
example—and shown very briefly. Participants had difficulty identifying the correct images in the early stages,
but accuracy rates steadily climbed with practice.
About one year later, a group of participants were called back and their performance on the task was
re-measured, both with the same set of items they’d been exposed to earlier, and with a new set from the same
class of images. Researchers found that when they showed participants the original images, accuracy rates
were high. When they showed participants new images, accuracy rates plummeted, even though the new
images closely resembled the learned ones, and they hadn’t seen the original images for at least a year.
“During those months in between visits to our lab, our participants would have seen thousands of faces, and yet
somehow maintained information about precisely which faces they had seen over a year ago,” says Allison
Sekuler, co-author of the study and professor and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience in the
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour. “The brain really seems to hold onto specific
information, which provides great promise for the development of brain training, but also raises questions about
what happens as a function of development. How much information do we store as we grow, older and how
does the type of information we store change across our lifetimes? And what is the impact of storing all that
potentially irrelevant information on our ability to learn and remember more relevant information?”
She and her colleagues point to children today who are growing up in a world in which they are bombarded with
sensory information, and wonders what will happen.
“We don’t yet know the long-term implications of retaining all this information, which is why it is so important to
understand the physiological underpinnings,” says Patrick Bennett, co-author and professor and Canada
Research Chair in Vision Science in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour. “This result
warrants further study on how we can optimize our ability to train the brain to preserve what would be considered
the most valuable information.”
The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the
Canada Research Chair program.
A pdf of the study can be found at: http://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/images/PsychSciFinal.pdf
Editors: please note Zahra Hussain is based in the UK but is available for interviews. She can be contacted at
zahra.hussain@nottingham.ac.uk
To arrange an interview with Allison Sekuler or Patrick Bennett, please contact Michelle Donovan at
donovam@mcmaster.ca or Wade Hemsworth at hemswor@mcmaster.ca.
McMaster University, one of four Canadian universities listed among the Top 100 universities in the world, is
renowned for its innovation in both learning and discovery. It has a student population of 23,000, and more than
140,000 alumni in 128 countries.
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For more information, please contact:
Michelle Donovan
Public Relations Manager
McMaster University
905-525-9140, ext. 22869
donovam@mcmaster.ca
Wade Hemsworth
Public Relations Manager
McMaster University
905-525-9140, ext. 27988
hemswor@mcmaster.ca