Researchers prove how the brain simulates external rewards to drive memory training
Human beings can learn with effective results, especially when they are externally rewarded (for example, with money or incentives after their actions). Unlike external training, the self-organized or driven intrinsically learning is referred to learning processes without any objective reward. Humans are often involved in these kind of learning activities without any reward (think of the amount of time we spend finding solutions to crossword games, solving interesting problems, learning games or taking up languages). An interesting fact is to define how they develop and keep these learning activities as self-driven.
Human beings can learn with effective results, especially when they are externally rewarded (for example, with money or incentives after their actions). Unlike external training, the self-organized or driven intrinsically learning is referred to learning processes without any objective reward. Humans are often involved in these kind of learning activities without any reward (think of the amount of time we spend finding solutions to crossword games, solving interesting problems, learning games or taking up languages). An interesting fact is to define how they develop and keep these learning activities as self-driven.
An international team of scientists from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona (Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, IDIBELL-UB) and the University of Magdeburg (Department of Biological Psychology) showed in their last research project, published in eLife, that this internal self-driven learning process uses a network of brain areas very similar to the one that drives external learning. During the self-organized learning, the brain activates the rewarding system to give a signal of “rewarding pleasure”. This signal shows the importance of the process where the reward meets the memory training system and how it drives the same memory training.
Previous researches had shown that brain memory structures communicate with rewarding areas if there is an external reward offered during the learning process. In this study, researchers proposed identifying the areas in the brain that are linked to the non-reward learning. In the results they saw that the same involved areas in the external rewarding process are also activated during the internally driven learning. This suggests that the brain can simulate the idea of an external reward.
The researchers scanned the brain of thirty-six volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The participants had to read sentences that had new words while they were being scanned; half of the coupled sentences gave a coherent sense to the new word. Volunteers were asked to figure out the meaning of these words on their own, without any external help. Each time a volunteer learned the meaning of a new word, the activity of memory-reward route in the brain increased.
“We wanted to test if we could link the activity of this route to longer memory tracks”, says Pablo Ripollés (IBIDELL-UB), first author of the work. “Actually -he added-, we discovered that the activity of the reward-memory route is higher for the words that are remembered an hour later”. In two experiments they showed the participantsʼ satisfaction during the learning process was higher for new words that were remembered even a week later. Coherently, skin conductance responses -an emotional processing indicator- were also higher for the words that were remembered. “All of our tests point to an essential participation of the processes related to rewards, which go higher intrinsically during the internally driven learning” says Ripollés.
“External rewards and comments, such as exam marks, are common educative strategies. We can only speculate about how this internal mechanism reacts when facing external signs”, added Antoni Rodríguez Fornells (ICREA, IDIBELL-UB), co-author of the study. “A key factor for the future is to identify in what circumstances the internally driven learning is more effective than the external one based on incentives. This will define how to use the internally driven learning to improve education programs (for example, a second language) or rehabilitation programs (for example, recovering verbal skills that were lost after a cerebrovascular accident”.
Reference to article:
P. Ripollés, J. Marco Pallarès, H. Alicart, C. Tempelmann, A. Rodríguez Fornells, T. Noesselt. «Intrinsic monitoring of learning success facilitates memory encoding via the activation of the SN/VTA-Hippocampal loop». eLife, September 2016. Doi: 10.7554/eLife.17441