Considering brain activity is important in predicting whether someone will remember or forget something, according to a March 24 study published by two UT researchers. The study furthers the understanding of how the brain learns and could improve the way students learn, postdoctoral fellow Soroush Mirjalili said.
The researchers, Mirjalili and psychology professor Audrey Duarte, combined brain activity measurements with data from memory tests using different types of machine learning to predict whether someone will remember something, Mirjalili said.
“One of the critical things about this research is the fact that we can predict memory success more accurately than before,” Mirjalili said.
Mirjalili said classic memory experiments focus on whether participants remember or forget an event and don’t measure brain activity, like perception or attention. He said this study considered perception, selective attention and sustained attention.
Perception is a person’s understanding and interpretation of an event, Mirjalili said. Selective attention is when the person chooses to pay attention to an event while there are other distractions, and sustained attention means paying attention over a longer period of time, like driving down the highway, Mirjalili said.
“All these perceptual and attentional processes are really important to deciding whether you will remember something or not,” Mirjalili said.
This research has many potential real world benefits, Duarte said. She said this research could potentially be applied to real time monitoring of people’s brain activity levels in the future, which can show the brain’s state of attention and perception.
“If we know that, then we could intervene and improve those different functions through various methods,” Duarte said.
If someone sees that a person’s sustained attention state is less active, they can suggest a break for the person, Mirjalili said.
Mirjalili and Duarte measured brain activity through electroencephalography, which measures electricity levels in the brain when it is active. They then collected brain activity data on participants during a memory test, Mirjalili said. The researchers compared the data to see if similar parts of the brain were active during both tests.
By combining brain activity data with the data from the memory test, the researchers found the higher the brain activity, the higher the chances are of remembering an event, Mirjalili said.
“We (then) make the prediction whether that event was later remembered or forgotten,” Mirjalili said.
