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Journal ArticleDOI

Structural brain plasticity in adult learning and development.

01 Nov 2013-Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (Elsevier)-Vol. 37, Iss: 9, pp 2296-2310
TL;DR: It is shown how understanding learning-related changes in human brain structure can expand the knowledge about adult development and aging and promote research on the mechanisms regulating experience-dependent structural plasticity of the adult human brain.
About: This article is published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.The article was published on 2013-11-01 and is currently open access. It has received 271 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Brain mapping & Developmental plasticity.

Summary (2 min read)

1. Introduction

  • Here the authors review the available evidence on experiencedependent morphological changes in the adult human brain, focusing on alterations in grey matter volume and cortical thickness.
  • The formulation of explicit hypotheses and concomitant research about the mechanisms involved is relatively sparse.
  • Based on theoretical considerations and empirical work from related strands of research, such as animal models, the authors generate predictions that may advance understanding of the function, sequential progression, and microstructural nature of volume and thickness changes.
  • The evidence on these predictions is reviewed, and further avenues for testing specific hypotheses are delineated.

2. Structural brain plasticity in adult learning

  • Overall, looking at the studies with acceptable quality that provide information on effect sizes, reported net effects of experience on hippocampal volume are in the 2-4% range (Erickson et al., 2011; Lövdén et al., 2012; Mårtensson et al., 2012) .
  • Though the magnitude of these effects sizes should be interpreted with caution, because only significant effects are considered, the upper limit of these effects indicate that experience-dependent effects on grey matter are likely to be relatively small.

2.2. Microstructural changes underlying changes in regional grey matter volume and cortical thickness

  • In summary, evidence on the microstructural changes behind experience-dependent changes in human brain volume is scarce.
  • In line with animal work, human evidence suggests that volume changes may reflect neuronal alterations.
  • Findings on micro-structural changes in humans are limited to the hippocampus, and it is unknown whether the results generalize to the neocortex.
  • More evidence on this issue may come from integration of methods and paradigms in systems and molecular neuroscience (Zatorre et al., 2012) , using the same paradigms and MRI measures in animals and humans, supplemented by histological measures in animals.
  • Using complementary information from several neuroimaging techniques (Draganski et al., 2011) may also further their understanding of experience-dependent volume changes, and of brain plasticity in general.

2.3. The time course of experience-dependent volume changes

  • In summary, the time course of experience-dependent brain-volume changes in humans remains unknown.
  • Theoretical models and animal work (Fu and Zuo, 2011; Holtmaat and Svoboda, 2009; Molina-Luna et al., 2008; Quallo et al., 2009; Reed et al., 2011 ) predict that regional volumes may rapidly expand during learning and then partially renormalize, despite continued training.
  • Such investigations may advance their understanding of the mechanisms regulating experience-dependent changes in regional brain volume (May, 2011) .
  • In such investigations, it is also important to take functional changes into consideration -an issue largely neglected so far.

3. Structural brain plasticity in adult development

  • In sum, evidence from animal and human research suggests that changes in structural plasticity during adulthood and old age are gradual, rather than abrupt.
  • It is impossible to unequivocally state whether experience-dependent brain changes are reduced in late relative to early adulthood.
  • Age-comparative studies that investigate both younger and older adults in the same training paradigm in the same study are scarce.
  • Instead, most studies show structural plasticity either in young or old adults.
  • Thus, the extent to which the aged brain harbors the potential to exhibit plastic changes relative to a young adult brain is difficult to gauge.

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References
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Book
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TL;DR: An automated method for accurately measuring the thickness of the cerebral cortex across the entire brain and for generating cross-subject statistics in a coordinate system based on cortical anatomy is presented.
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"Structural brain plasticity in adul..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Experience-dependent changes in regional grey matter olume and cortical thickness In the early 1960s, Rosenzweig et al. (1962, 1964) were the rst to apply the complex enrichment paradigm (e.g., Hebb, 1949) o study effects of experience on the brain....

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Frequently Asked Questions (1)
Q1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Structural brain plasticity in adult learning and development" ?

The authors review this research and relate it to models of brain plasticity from related strands of research, such as work on animal models. This allows us to generate recommendations and predictions for future research that may advance the understanding of the function, sequential progression, and microstructural nature of experience-dependent changes in regional brain volumes.