The research findings were presented at Neuroscience 2011, the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
Specifically, the studies show that:
- Two brain regions associated with personal recollections and obsessive compulsive disorder are larger in individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition that allows people to remember nearly every event of their lives (Aurora Leport, abstract 603.04).
- A German cellist with severe amnesia not only performs normally on a standardized test for musical memory, he is also able to acquire new musical information. The finding suggests musical memories are stored differently than other memories in the brain (Carsten Finke, MD, abstract 287.17).
- The phenomenon of "change blindness," the common inability to notice changes that occur right before our eyes, may result from a failure to consciously compare consecutive scenes, according to new research using a 100-year-old card trick (Luis Martinez, PhD, abstract 93.09).
- A key cognitive control area of the brain functions abnormally in children with ADHD - a factor that may make it more difficult for these children to perform in school (Tudor Puiu, abstract 93.13).
- The brains of postmenopausal, middle-aged women with cognitive complaints work harder when performing a working memory task than the brains of women without such complaints - a difference that may help identify those at risk for dementia (Julie Dumas, PhD, abstract 645.11).