Integrating memories: Exploring knowledge integration enhancement at the intersection of education and neuroscience

Project Information

Integrating Memories

Grant agreement ID: 704506

DOI

10.3030/704506

Project closed

EC signature date 8 March 2016

Start date 1 December 2016

End date 21 September 2019

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 165 598,80

EU contribution

€ 165 598,80

Coordinated by

STICHTING VU
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Integrating Memories (Integrating memories: Exploring knowledge integration enhancement at the intersection of education and neuroscience)

Reporting period: 2016-12-01 to 2018-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

"Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships Final Report
Marlieke van Kesteren, grant #704506
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/marliekevk/

Summary
In education it is vital to effectively build knowledge, but underlying neurocognitive processes are still poorly understood. To successfully structure our knowledge, we can integrate separately learned instances by inferring an association between them. In the brain, this integration of old and new memories has been suggested to be facilitated by the reinstatement of prior knowledge during new learning, but it remains unclear exactly how reinstatement enables effective building of such prior knowledge structures, especially in real-world educational settings. I here examined the neural processes underlying these integration processes and explored how actively controlling them can benefit learning of educationally relevant information. This novel approach enables investigating educationally relevant knowledge building in the brain, yielding essential fundamental insights while concurrently generating new knowledge building strategies for educational settings.
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Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In this project, I have collaborated with researchers (most notably Professors Martijn Meeter and Lydia Krabbendam) from LEARN! and the Institute of Brain and Behavior Amsterdam (iBBA) at the VU University Amsterdam to unravel the facilitation of memory integration, both in educational settings and in the brain. I ran two memory integration experiments in which we investigated whether congruency between and reactivation of prior knowledge affected memory of separately learned associations. In the first experiment, I used educationally relevant stimuli in a group of psychology and education students. This experiment showed that both congruency and reactivation enhanced memory integration in an educationally relevant setting (van Kesteren et al., 2018). In the second experiment I used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to look into the neural signatures underlying these processes. With more simple, fMRI-compatible stimuli (scenes and faces) we replicated our behavioral effects. Moreover, we found that reactivation of a region in which scenes are processed, along with memory-related regions, was associated with subjective reactivation strength of the scene. These results show that active reactivation of previously learned information leads to enhanced associative memory, and this is governed by reinstatement of the pattern related to the previous memory in the brain (van Kesteren et al., under review). In line with Open Science policies, this study (just like our previous, already published paper) is already available on a preprint server (van Kesteren et al., 2019).

Additional to these two studies, I ran two other studies with BSc and MSc students in the lab of Martijn Meeter. In the first study, we tried to enhance memory integration in an online statistics course and one in which we explored how to prevent false memories (a side effect of memory integration) from happening. Unfortunately, neither of these studies yielded significant, publishable results, but we did preregister the latter on the Open Science Framework along with the MSc thesis that resulted from the project (https://osf.io/8w3mz). Additionally, I helped students within the Developmental Neuropsychology Lab headed by Lydia Krabbendam with their fMRI studies and analyses. This resulted in three co-authored papers, of which one is now published (Lemmers-Jansen et al., 2019) one accepted for publication (Flinkenflogel et al, 2019), and one submitted (Sijtsma et al., under review). Additionally, I co-wrote a review on the Neuroimaging of Learning and Development (van Atteveldt et al., 2018). Finally, Martijn Meeter and I have submitted a review paper (van Kesteren et al, submitted) and will submit and excerpt of that paper to Frontiers in Young minds as well, so kids can learn from our insights as well.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

I presented this research in five national and international conferences in the Netherlands, US, UK, and Chile, either on a poster or in a talk. For two of these I received a Travel Award to participate. I also discussed my results in an invited lecture in two labs in Germany and Spain, on several occasions within our labs and on the LEARN! Institute Annual Seminar in 2019. Finally, I have participated in a Monitoring meeting of the European Commission in Brussels in 2019. In the future, I will present my research at Society for Neuroscience 2019, the largest neuroscientific conference in the US, and at NVP Winterconference 2019 in the Netherlands, both as an invited speaker in a symposium.

Next to my research activities, I was given the opportunity to mentor BSc, MSc and PhD students, and give several occasional guest lectures for both students, fellow researchers, and the public. I wrote blogs in Dutch and English and about my and associated research, and published a popular science article in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/09/what-you-already-know-is-the-key-to-learning-new-things). I was also nominated for two prices (New Scientist Science Talent 2018, and Viva 400 2018), volunteered twice as a coach for the Donders Education Hackathon in which groups tried to make the best educational app, and served as a review editor for Frontiers in Young Minds, helping kids to review a scientific paper. Finally, to develop my organizational skills and extend my network, I co-organized a conference (EARLI Neuroscience and Education) held in Amsterdam in 2016, the bi-monthly iBBA colloquium series, and moderated a bi-weekly fMRI meeting for our extended labs.

In summary, my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship was very valuable to me as I learned a multitude of new skills, further developed existing skills, and published research that is useful not only to advance research in the field of memory integration, but also to be applied by students and teachers to enhance learning practices. Moreover, it gave me the opportunity to work together with renowned researchers in the field of development, memory and education. This helped me to truly develop myself as an Educational Neuroscientist that performs research on the intersection of Neuroscience and Education, which was exactly what I intended when I initially wrote my grant proposal.

References
Lemmers-Jansen ILJ, Fett AJ, Shergill SS, van Kesteren MTR, Krabbendam L (2019) Girls-Boys: An Investigation of Gender Differences in the Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Trust and Reciprocity in Adolescence. Front Hum Neurosci 13:257.
van Atteveldt N, van Kesteren M, Braams B, Krabbendam L (2018) Neuroimaging of learning and development: improving ecological validity. Frontline Learning Research 6.
van Kesteren MTR, Krabbendam L, Meeter M (2018) Integrating educational knowledge: reactivation of prior knowledge during educational learning enhances memory integration. npj Science of Learning 3:11.
van Kesteren MTR, Rignanese P, Gianferrara PG, Krabbendam L, Meeter M (2019) Integrating memories: Congruency and reactivation aid memory integration through reinstatement of prior knowledge. bioRxiv:716076.
NB: I have not always used the exact same sentence describing the contribution of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to my papers, but I have always mentioned it and included the grant number.

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