Why do children learn faster than adults? New study provides clues

Providence, Rhode Island [Brown University] — Children are great at learning large amounts of new information quickly and easily. New research shows that the key behind this ability to quickly process ABCs and 123s is spelled “GABA.”

GABA is an abbreviation for γ-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter.of the studyResearchers published in the journal Current Biology describe GABA’s key role in helping children process new information and prepare their brains to learn and store more.

“What we found was a rapid increase in learning-related GABA in children,” said lead study author Takeo Watanabe, a professor of cognitive and language sciences at Brown University.

Watanabe said this is both a groundbreaking discovery and a surprise. Until now, there has been no clear neuroscientific evidence to explain why children learn more efficiently than adults. , which means that a cooling period is required.

Even after learning something new, the neural networks involved in adults processing information are still flexible and “hot,” Watanabe said. If the same or similar neural network needs to learn something else quickly, it can discard and effectively overwrite the information it just processed recently. This well-known phenomenon is called retrograde interference, he explained.

The neurotransmitter GABA plays an important role in helping the brain integrate new information. Protects knowledge from retrograde interference. But this kind of his GABA-repressive processing is not fully mature in children, he said, who have lower levels of her GABA and therefore have less control and impulse control than adults. It’s weak.

So if GABA is needed to set up the brain to learn a sequence of items, and children have less GABA than adults, then how do children, as Watanabe puts it, “learn, learn, learn?” can you “learn”?

In previous studies, GABA levels in children were measured only at certain time points in contexts unrelated to learning. Scientists realized that in order to understand the mechanisms of learning, it was necessary to examine how GABA concentrations change in relation to different stages of learning.

For this study, Watanabe and researchers, including Sebastian Frank, a postdoctoral fellow in Watanabe’s lab who now heads an independent research group at the University of Regensburg in Germany, took a different approach.

Using an advanced imaging technique called functional MRS, they measured concentrations of GABA in early visual cortical regions before, during, and after learning sessions. Concentrations in adults (ages 18-35) were compared.

They found that the total amount of GABA in children was actually lower than in adults before learning began. The second Between rounds of learning, concentrations of GABA in adults did not change.

“Successive learning sessions appeared to increase the concentration of GABA in children, allowing nascent learning to stabilize rapidly,” Frank said.

In subsequent behavioral experiments, researchers found that resilience to retrograde interference, and thus stabilization, actually occurred within minutes of the children’s session ending. Adults, on the other hand, remained in what researchers called the weaker learning state for at least an hour after the session.

The results of the experiment suggest that compared with adults, children exhibit more dynamic GABA-related inhibitory processing and adapt more quickly than adults to stabilize learning, the researchers conclude. I was.

“The rapid stabilization of children’s learning allows them to learn more in a given period of time, making them more efficient learners than adults,” Frank said.

Although the experiment focused on visual learning, Watanabe said the findings could be generalized to other types of learning, including memory. What’s even more interesting is that findings about child learning may be used to help adults learn more effectively.

“For example, new techniques and treatments may be developed to increase the amount of GABA in the adult brain,” Watanabe said. “It’s one of the possible applications he has.”

This work was supported in part by the Fred M. Seed Foundation and the US-Israel Bilateral Science Foundation (BSF2016058).