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My lab:
lab.png
Or at least this is what the headlines at Slashdot, ScienceDaily and PhysOrg purport. What the new study (ok, it's actually a month old) shows is that what is called the "generation effect" in humans can also be found in monkeys. From Wikipedia:
The generation effect refers to the robust finding that information will be better remembered if it is generated rather than simply read.[1] For example, you are more like to remember the word "orangutan" if you generate it from the fragment "or_ng_ta_" than if you simply see the word in its entirety.
What Kornell and Terrace found out was that monkeys in a choice task also learn the task better if they can actively try it out and make errors at every choice, rather than to receive hints as to what the right choice is. Basically, what this means is learning-by-doing: much as children learn in a single trial not to touch the hotplat, despite frequent parental admonitions not to touch it, monkeys have to try it themselves for the memory to stick. The paper is a great piece of work and you should go and see the monkey videos on Terrace's website.
But what about the flies?
Well, this generation effect in flies was already published in 2000: operant control facilitates learning. This was one result of my diploma (master's) thesis which was completed in 1996 (but the paper wasn't published until 4 years later). So basically this information was freely available on the internet for over 10 years now, but when I emailed the author Nate Kornell, he had never heard of our work in flies. Just goes to show that OpenScience alone doesn't really help spread the information. Of course this doesn't mean to imply that this is somehow Nate's fault! Not at all: how could he know about related fly behavioral experiments on some obscure website from a (then) undergraduate biology student? Until I read Nate's paper, I didn't even know the term "generation effect" existed!
Oh, and by the way: apparently already Thorndike showed the generation effect in rats, cats and dogs: his animals did not learn how to get out of the puzzle box if he merely showed them the mechanism.
Anyway, maybe I should consider "flies learn the same way as humans (monkeys, rats, cats, dogs etc.), biologists find" for my next press-release headline incognito.png
Posted on Wednesday 05 September 2007 - 14:28:57 comment: 0
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