Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, believe that it’s possible to predict how well people can remember information by monitoring their brain activity while they study.
A team in Sandia’s cognitive systems group monitored test subjects with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors while they studied word lists, then used the information to predict who would remember the most information.
Since the researchers knew the average percentage of correct answers under various conditions, they had a baseline of what brain activity looked like for good and poor memory performance. The computer model predicted 5 of the 23 people tested would perform best. The model was correct: They remembered 72 percent of the words on average, compared to 45 percent for everyone else.
