Garvin Brod

The influence of prior knowledge on memory: a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective

Across ontogenetic development, individuals gather manifold experiences during which they detect regularities in their environment and thereby accumulate knowledge. This knowledge is used to guide behavior, make predictions, and acquire further new knowledge. In this review, we discuss the influence of prior knowledge on memory from both the psychology and the emerging cognitive neuroscience literature and provide a developmental perspective on this topic. Recent neuroscience findings point to a prominent role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and of the hippocampus (HC) in the emergence of prior knowledge and in its application during the processes of successful memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. We take the lateral PFC into consideration as well and discuss changes in both medial and lateral PFC and HC across development and postulate how these may be related to the development of the use of prior knowledge for remembering. For future direction, we argue that, to measure age differential effects of prior knowledge on memory, it is necessary to distinguish the availability of prior knowledge from its accessibility and use.

Differences in the neural signature of remembering schema-congruent and schema-incongruent events

New experiences are remembered in relation to ones existing world knowledge or schema. Recent research suggests that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) supports the retrieval of schema-congruent information. However, the neural mechanisms supporting memory for information violating a schema have remained elusive, presumably because incongruity is inherently ambiguous in tasks that rely on world knowledge. We present a novel paradigm that experimentally induces hierarchically structured knowledge to directly contrast neural correlates that contribute to the successful retrieval of schema-congruent versus schema-incongruent information. We hypothesize that remembering incongruent events engages source memory networks including the lateral PFC. In a sample of young adults, we observed enhanced activity in the dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), in the posterior parietal cortex, and in the striatum when successfully retrieving incongruent events, along with enhanced connectivity between DLPFC and striatum. In addition, we found enhanced mPFC activity for successfully retrieved events that are congruent with the induced schema, presumably reflecting a role of the mPFC in biasing retrieval towards schema-congruent episodes. We conclude that medial and lateral PFC contributions to memory retrieval differ by schema congruency, and highlight the utility of the new experimental paradigm for addressing developmental research questions.

Does It Really Matter? Separating the Effects of Musical Training on Syntax Acquisition

The possible transfer of musical expertise to the acquisition of syntactical structures in first and second language has emerged recently as an intriguing topic in the research of cognitive processes. However, it is unlikely that the benefits of musical training extend equally to the acquisition of all syntactical structures. As cognitive transfer presumably requires overlapping processing components and brain regions involved in these processing components, one can surmise that transfer between musical ability and syntax acquisition would be limited to structural elements that are shared between the two. We propose that musical expertise transfers only to the processing of recursive long-distance dependencies inherent in hierarchical syntactic structures. In this study, we taught fifty-six participants with widely varying degrees of musical expertise the artificial language BROCANTO, which allows the direct comparison of long-distance and local dependencies. We found that the quantity of musical training (measured in accumulated hours of practice and instruction) explained unique variance in performance in the long-distance dependency condition only. These data suggest that musical training facilitates the acquisition specifically of hierarchical syntactic structures.

Does one year of schooling improve children's cognitive control and alter associated brain activation?

The “5-to-7-year shift” refers to the remarkable improvements observed in children’s cognitive abilities during this age range, particularly in their ability to exert control over their attention and behavior—that is, their executive functioning. As this shift coincides with school entry, the extent to which it is driven by brain maturation or by exposure to formal schooling is unclear. In this longitudinal study, we followed 5-year-olds born close to the official cutoff date for entry into first grade and compared those who subsequently entered first grade that year with those who remained in kindergarten, which is more play oriented. The first graders made larger improvements in accuracy on an executive-function test over the year than did the kindergartners. In an independent functional MRI task, we found that the first graders, compared with the kindergartners, exhibited a greater increase in activation of right posterior parietal cortex, a region previously implicated in sustained attention; increased activation in this region was correlated with the improvement in accuracy. These results reveal how the environmental context of formal schooling shapes brain mechanisms underlying improved focus on cognitively demanding tasks.

Preferred Dance Tempo: Does Sex or Body Morphology influence how we groove?

Abstract In two experiments participants tuned a drum machine to their preferred dance tempo. Measurements of height, shoulder width, leg length, and weight were taken for each participant, and their sex recorded. Using a multiple regression analysis, height and leg length combined was found to be the best predictors of preferred dance tempo in Experiment 1. A second experiment, where males and females were matched in terms of height, resulted in no significant correlation between sex and preferred dance tempo. In the matched sample, height was found to be the single best predictor but with a relatively small effect size. These results are consistent with a biomechanical ‘resonance’ model of dancing.

Specifying the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in memory formation

ABSTRACT Recent neuroimaging research suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays an important role for successful memory formation that takes place in the context of activated prior knowledge. These findings led to the notion that the vmPFC integrates new information into existing knowledge structures. However, a considerable number of neuroimaging studies that have investigated memory formation in the context of prior knowledge have not found vmPFC involvement. To resolve this inconsistency, we propose a distinction between knowledge‐relevance (the degree to which new information can be linked to prior knowledge) and knowledge‐congruency (the perceived match between prior knowledge and the to‐be‐encoded information). We hypothesized that the vmPFC contributes to successful memory formation only when perceived knowledge‐congruency is high, independent of knowledge‐relevance. We tested this hypothesis in a design that varied both congruency and relevance during memory encoding, which was performed in the MR scanner. As predicted, the results showed that vmPFC contributions to memory formation vary as a function of knowledge‐congruency, but not as a function of knowledge‐relevance. Our finding contributes to elucidating the seemingly inconsistent findings in the literature and helps to specify the role of the vmPFC in memory formation. HIGHLIGHTSThe vmPFC is suggested to integrate new information into existing knowledge structures.However, many studies on prior knowledge effects have not found vmPFC involvement.We show that subjectively perceived knowledge‐congruency modulates vmPFC involvement.Relevance of prior knowledge did not modulate vmPFC involvement.Knowledge‐congruency and knowledge‐relevance should be distinguished.