Practice makes man perfect was not just an old school proverb after all
Ever so happened that you move to an entirely unfamiliar locality and the first day is just really clumsy and fussy, and then as you slug through the days, you just happen to very smoothly go along with your daily routine with no hassles at all? Like maybe driving to work or walking the dog?
That is what the power of our brain’s cognitive ability is. The scientists at the University of California San Diego have now found that this cognitive phenomenon not only applies to rudimentary tasks but also to career related activities that require training; that behavioral training changes the way attention facilitates information processing in the human brain.
The scientists, in the course of their study, monitored behavioral performance and brain activity in humans over the period of month using electroencephalography (EEG). The participants were asked to perform a computer task requiring them to direct their attention to a visual stimulus. The results indicated that early in the task, attention enhanced the magnitude of sensory-evoked responses in the visual cortex part of the brain. The scientists by using computational modeling also found that this attention gain predicted the
benefit of training and surprisingly, after extended training, this attention gain disappeared, even though behavioral performance was still improved compared to before training.Their modeling experiment indicated that after extended training noise-reduction in brain activity predicted the benefit of training in behavioral performance.
“Most primate studies have to train subjects over many months to perform behavioral tasks that humans can conceptualize and perform well within 2-3 minutes. So, it is not surprising that many times, results obtained from humans and monkeys diverge from one another. Here we had to train human participants across many days to observe converging results across the two species. Our research, which demonstrates that attention mechanisms could change with training, teaches us that we can’t fully understand how attention operates at the neural level without understanding how attention mechanisms may change through a course of training. Thus, our research has important implications for understanding attention mechanisms, as well as for generalizing results from studies using different species that often require substantially different amounts of training.” Says Sirawaj Itthipuripat, lead scientist of the study.
