Ricerc@Sapienza

Cognitive impairments are a common hallmark of many neurological and psychiatric diseases. With the increasing prevalence of such diseases, there is a pressing need to identify effective interventions that prolong independent functioning. As pharmacological interventions aimed at slowing cognitive decline have been found to have a number of limitations, research has now moved toward studying complementary non-pharmacological cognitive training interventions. One such technique is called the spacing effect. The spacing effect is the observation that information presented using spaced repetitions is better remembered than information presented via massed repetitions (Toppino & Gerbier, 2014). It has been recently demonstrated that spaced training can rescue memory and restore activation of key molecular processes in genetically modified mice with congenital memory deficits. These finding suggest that the understanding of the mechanisms that underpin the expression of the distributed-practice effect could be powerful tools to identify new pharmacological approaches for memory enhancement. We will expand this research to study the cellular basis of distributed learning and to find novel genes regulating the spacing effect.
This project represents one of the first efforts to identify the neural bases of the so-called spacing effect. The results will open previously unexplored avenues of readily implementable, neurobiologically based therapeutic strategy for intellectual disability.