Study points on children's brain activity that reveals their memory ability

A recent study on children has unveiled a unique brain activity that reveals how good their memories are.

The study has been published in the journal JNeurosci.

When you scramble to remember a phone number as you enter it into your phone, you rely on your working memory to keep the number at the front of your mind.

Briefly holding and mpulating information relies on the activity of the frontoparietal network, a group of brain regions coined the "cognition core". Working memory performance changes throughout development.

Rosenberg et al. analyzed fMRI data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) data set, a repository of scans and behavioural tests from over 11,000 children aged nine and ten.

Children with better working memory performed better on a range of cognitive, language, and problem-solving tasks.

Activity in the frontoparietal network during a memory task reflected the individual working memory capabilities of the children, with an activity pattern unique to working memory.

The ABCD data set will reexamine the children for ten years, allowing future studies to explore how the neural signature of working memory evolves across development.

( With inputs from ANI )