Like a time machine, episodic memory allows us to travel into the past in our minds and relive personal experiences with complete clarity, as if we were living them all over again. These can range from remembering where we left the car keys last night to the last time we saw a family member we haven’t seen in years. This ability to record daily experiences begins to deteriorate early in people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
A team of researchers from the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) has now conducted a study on episodic memory performance in a specific environment and its relationship with locomotion, body movement and environmental features in an environment equipped with new immersive technologies, in order to determine how memories of lived experiences are created.
“The study focuses on how episodic memory works, more specifically on how the spatial environment influences how and how effectively memories are organized in our minds,” said Álvaro Pastor, an architect, cognitive scientist, researcher at the XR-Lab and Learning, Media and Entertainment (GAME) research group of the UOC, and one of the lead authors of the study, together with Pierre Bourdin-Kreitz, member of the research group and research staff at the Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications of the UOC and coordinator of the XR-Lab at the same university.
The study, published open access in the Scientific Reports journal (Nature group), seeks to determine whether active navigation (when a person moves through a given environment) affects the way episodic memory works and to study how physical memory works. features of their spatial environment can modulate the way episodic memory is organized.
The authors conducted a series of tests using immersive technologies at the CaixaForum Museum in Barcelona. An analysis of the data suggests that such technologies have potential applications in designing non-invasive treatments and therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.
The researchers point out that the relationship between space and episodic memory has been the subject of scientific research for decades. In fact, the loci or mind palace method, one of the oldest mnemonics and one of the most reliably proven, is based on creating a mental building and associating pieces of information with specific places within it.
Creating a cognitive map
During the study, the 28 participants walked through the two floors of the museum, which were connected by a staircase, passively using virtual reality or actively using augmented reality. During their tour they were shown a number of images in specific locations on each floor.
The authors then tested how much each participant could remember both immediately after the tour and 48 hours later. According to the authors, “the results suggest that participants who completed the route on foot recalled more information in both tests.”
Furthermore, when the authors looked at the location of the most memorable images, participants remembered more information from the place where they changed floors: the stairs. “Information learned next to the museum steps was more memorable than that in the middle or end of the route, even though it was close to colorful works of art,the authors said.
After analyzing the data and the subjects’ responses, the authors noted that active learning experiences can lead to better episodic memory performance than passive encoding.
By actively navigating an environment, we can gather enough information so that our episodic systems can build a kind of cognitive map of our experiences, leading to more effective memory.”
Álvaro Pastor, architect, cognitive scientist, researcher at the XR-Lab and Learning, Media and Entertainment (GAME) research group of the UOC
Furthermore, the physical elements involved in active navigation, whether they help or hinder it, appear to be more strongly integrated into our memory of the experience. In fact, the data shows that information and experiences gained in physical parts of the museum, such as the stairs, are remembered better than stimuli from other places. “This peculiarity suggests that our cognitive map, in recording the experience, places a particular focus on the salient aspects of spatial navigation and creates associations between these aspects and the information learned when they are physically nearby.‘, said the UOC researcher.
Use of artificial intelligence
The study also looked at the type of images shown during the museum tour that participants were asked to remember. These images were frontal portraits of artificial human faces generated specifically for this study using neural network-based AI.
“By creating artificial faces, we were able to provide participants with images they had never seen before and ensure that their facial features were uniform, including their facial expression and lighting,” said Pastor, who also noted that the high-sensitivity cognitive tasks involved in episodic memory include remembering a person’s face after the initial encounter and the contextual details of the encounter, as well as its time and place.
Memory improvement applications
In terms of the practical applications of the research, the research has led to the development of a new and sound method using immersive technologies to better assess episodic memory under natural conditions similar to real-world conditions. This means that scientifically proven information is available to help design therapies that include active exploration through enriched spatial environments.
“In the case of healthy individuals, using the results of this study in active learning experiences with immersive apps could help maximize the memorability of information at specific locations of a course,” said Bourdin-Kreitz.
However, the benefits of active learning don’t stop with instructional design. “Engaging in active learning experiences that involve a person’s entire body, rather than learning passively, could be a preventative measure to help healthy people retain their episodic memory abilities longer,” Pastor said.
“As with the method of loci of mind Palace, the idea of walking while learning to increase retention may have been known to mankind since ancient times, at least if we are to believe the story that Aristotle taught his students philosophy while they continued the streets were running. of Athens, and thanks to immersive technologies we can now study this phenomenon in depth,” said Bourdin-Kreitz.
In terms of clinical applications, virtual and augmented reality technologies can be used to help design rehabilitation programs tailor-made for each patient. “Clinical interventions based on such technologies could potentially slow disease progression in a cheap and easily scalable manner and, because they are non-invasive, could help increase patient compliance without compromising safety,” the researchers concluded. authors. after noting that they continue to work on new research to, for example, add scents in a controlled way while simultaneously showing virtual images of test subjects on a virtual reality headset.
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