Brain News
A team of researchers at Brown University provided insights into why children learn faster than adults. The study is published in the journal Current Biology.
The Study
The researchers examined visual learning in elementary school children and adults in a series of experiments. They used behavioral and state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques to measure differences in GABA, a brain messenger that stabilizes newly learned material.
The Findings
The results revealed that children learn more quickly, in comparison to adults, because visual learning triggers an increase of GABA in children’s visual cortex, the brain area that processes visual information.
This GABA boost persists for several minutes after training ends, thereby helping children retain the information from the lessons better.
The authors added: “Our results imply that children exhibit highly efficient inhibitory, GABAergic processing in spite of inhibitory failures that have been observed in other domains such as cognitive control or attention. This implies that GABAergic processing involved in different aspects of cognitive function might mature at different speeds.”
To Know More You May Refer To
Frank, S. M., Becker, M., Qi, A., Geiger, P., Frank, U. I., Rosedahl, L. A., Malloni, W. M., Sasaki, Y., Greenlee, M. W., & Watanabe, T. (2022). Efficient learning in children with rapid GABA boosting during and after training. Current biology : CB, 32(23), 5022–5030.e7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.021
