Category: Educational Psychology

Scientists have long puzzled over the many hours we spend in light, dreamless slumber. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests we're busy recharging our brain's learning capacity during this traditionally undervalued phase of sleep, which can take up half the night.

UC Berkeley researchers have found compelling evidence that bursts of brain waves known as "sleep spindles" may be networking between key regions of the brain to clear a path to learning. These electrical impulses help to shift fact-based memories from the brain's hippocampus — which has limited storage space — to the prefrontal cortex's "hard drive," thus freeing up the hippocampus to take in fresh data. Spindles are fast pulses of electricity generated during non-REM sleep, and they can occur up to 1,000 times a night.

"All these pieces of the puzzle tell a consistent and compelling story — that sleep spindles predict learning refreshment," said Matthew Walker, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study to be published March 8 in the journal Current Biology.

The study found that this spindle-driven networking was most likely to happen during Stage 2 of non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep, which occurs before we reach the deepest NREM sleep and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. This shallow stage of dreamless slumber can account for half our sleeping hours, and happens most frequently during the second half of the night, or in the latter part of a period in which we sleep.

"A lot of that spindle-rich sleep is occurring the second half of the night, so if you sleep six hours or less, you are shortchanging yourself. You will have fewer spindles, and you might not be able to learn as much," said Bryce Mander, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study.

As for broader societal ramifications, researchers said evidence that brain waves during the latter part of the sleep period promote our capacity to store fact-based memories raises the question of whether the early school day is optimal for learning.

"These findings further highlight the importance of sleep in our educational populations, where the need for learning is great, yet late bedtimes and early school start times prevent adequate sleep amounts," Mander said.

On average, adults spend one-third of their lives sleeping. Yet, no scientific consensus has been reached on why humans need sleep, Walker said. Previous research led by Walker has shown that a good night's rest helps us regulate our moods and cope with emotional challenges, while sleep deprivation can make otherwise reasonable people emotionally shaky, indicating a strong correlation between sleep loss and psychiatric disorders.

For this latest study, Walker and his team took 44 healthy young adults and subjected them to a rigorous memorizing task intended to tax the hippocampus. All participants performed at similar levels. The group was then divided, with one half taking a 90-minute nap while the other half stayed awake.

That evening, the entire group was subjected to another round of learning. The ability to memorize new information deteriorated for those who had remained awake throughout the day. In contrast, those who had napped not only performed better than the waking group, but actually improved their capability for learning, as if sleep had refreshed their memory capacity, the study found.

Electroencephalogram tests, which measured electrical activity in the brains of the nappers, showed that the more sleep spindles the nappers produced, the more refreshed they were for learning. Furthermore, researchers were able to link sleep spindles to brain activity looping between the lobes of the brain that house the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — two critical areas for memory.

"Our findings demonstrate that sleep may selectively seek out and operate on our memory systems to restore their critical functions," Walker said.

"This discovery indicates that we not only need sleep after learning to consolidate what we've memorized, but that we also need it before learning, so that we can recharge and soak up new information the next day."

UC Berkeley psychology students Sangeetha Santhanam and Jared M. Saletin are co-investigators in the study.

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Journal Reference:

1. Bryce A. Mander, Sangeetha Santhanam, Jared M. Saletin, Matthew P. Walker. Wake deterioration and sleep restoration of human learning. Current Biology, 2011; 21 (5): R183 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.01.019

Even long after it is formed, a memory in rats can be enhanced or erased by increasing or decreasing the activity of a brain enzyme, say researchers supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health.

"Our study is the first to demonstrate that, in the context of a functioning brain in a behaving animal, a single molecule, PKMzeta, is both necessary and sufficient for maintaining long-term memory," explained Todd Sacktor, of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, New York City, a grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health.

Sacktor, Yadin Dudai, Ph.D., of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues, report of their discovery March 4, 2011 in the journal Science.

Unlike other recently discovered approaches to memory enhancement, the PKMzeta mechanism appears to work any time. It is not dependent on exploiting time-limited windows when a memory becomes temporarily fragile and changeable — just after learning and upon retrieval — which may expire as a memory grows older, says Sacktor.

"This pivotal mechanism could become a target for treatments to help manage debilitating emotional memories in anxiety disorders and for enhancing faltering memories in disorders of aging," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D.

In their earlier studies, Sacktor's team showed that even weeks after rats learned to associate a nauseating sensation with saccharin and shunned the sweet taste, their sweet tooth returned within a couple of hours after rats received a chemical that blocked the enzyme PKMzeta in the brain's outer mantle, or neocortex, where long-term memories are stored.

In the new study, they paired genetic engineering with the same aversive learning model to both confirm the earlier studies and to demonstrate, by increasing PKMzeta, the opposite effect. They harnessed a virus to infect the neocortex with the PKMzeta gene, resulting in overexpression of the enzyme and memory enhancement. Conversely, introducing a mutant inactive form of the enzyme, that replaced the naturally occurring one, erased the memory — much as the chemical blocker did.

These effects applied generally to multiple memories stored in the targeted brain area — raising questions about how specific memories might be targeted in any future therapeutic application.

The researchers turned up a clue that may hold the beginning of an answer.

"One explanation of the memory enhancement is that PKMzeta might go to some synapses, or connections between brain cells, and not others," said Sacktor. "Overexpressed PKMzeta may be selectively captured by molecular tags that mark just those brain connections where it's needed — likely synapses that were holding the memory from the training."

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Journal References:

1. Reut Shema, Sharon Haramati, Shiri Ron, Shoshi Hazvi, Alon Chen, Todd Charlton Sacktor, Yadin Dudai. Enhancement of consolidated long-term memory by overexpression of protein kinase Mzeta in the neocortex. Science, 2011; 331 (6021): 1207-1210 DOI: 10.1126/science.1200215
2. Todd C. Sacktor. How does PKMζ maintain long-term memory?Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2010; 12 (1): 9 DOI: 10.1038/nrn2949

— If you tend to have trouble picking up the latest dance moves or learning to play a new piano piece, there might be an explanation. A new study published online on March 3rd in Current Biology, shows that people who are fast to learn a simple sequence of finger motions are also those whose brains show large changes in a particular chemical messenger following electrical stimulation.

That chemical messenger, known as GABA, is important for the plasticity of the motor cortex, a brain region involved in planning, control, and execution of voluntary movements.

"There is considerable variability in motor learning behavior across individuals," said Charlotte Stagg of the University of Oxford. "We aimed to test whether some of this variability could be explained by variation in responsiveness of the GABA system."

The researchers used magnetic resonance spectroscopy to directly measure GABA levels in the brain both before and after a low-level current was delivered through research participants' scalps. That procedure, called anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), is known to produce a decrease in GABA within the motor cortex. The exercise therefore allowed the researchers to quantify individuals' baseline GABA levels and their "GABA responsiveness."

On a separate day, those individuals were asked to learn a sequence of finger motions while their brains were again scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It turned out that those who were more GABA responsive were also quicker to learn the simple motor task. The brains of more GABA-responsive individuals also showed greater activation in the motor cortex during learning. The researchers also found that those with higher GABA concentrations at baseline tended to have slower reaction times and less brain activation during learning.

The findings suggest that GABA responsiveness may be key in the motor cortex for making the neural connections that are the cellular basis for learning and memory, the researchers say. They also offer an important window into recovery after brain injury, such as a stroke.

GABA levels can change after that kind of brain trauma, and the findings support the idea that treatments designed to influence GABA levels might improve learning. In fact, tDCS is already in use as a tool for motor rehabilitation in stroke patients.

"This shows how that might work," Stagg said. It may also lead to strategies for making those improvements longer lasting, she added.

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Journal Reference:

1. Charlotte J. Stagg, Velicia Bachtiar, Heidi Johansen-Berg. The Role of GABA in Human Motor Learning. Current Biology, 03 March 2011 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.01.069

Thousands of schoolchildren will soon be asking the questions when inquiry-based learning comes to science classrooms across Europe, turning the traditional model of science teaching on its head. The pan-European INQUIRE programme is an exciting new teacher-training initiative delivered by a seventeen-strong consortium of botanic gardens, natural history museums, universities and NGOs.

Coordinated by Innsbruck University Botanic Garden, with support from London-based Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), INQUIRE is a practical, one-year, continual professional development (CPD) course targeted at qualified teachers working in eleven European countries. Its focus on inquiry-based science education (IBSE) reflects a consensus in the science education community that IBSE methods are more effective than current teaching practices.

Designed to reflect how students actually learn, IBSE also engages them in the process of scientific inquiry. Increasingly it is seen as key to developing their scientific literacy, enhancing their understanding of scientific concepts and heightening their appreciation of how science works. Whereas traditional teaching methods have failed to engage many students, especially in developed countries, IBSE offers outstanding opportunities for effective and enjoyable teaching and learning. It provides stimulating environments for students to explore their learning in authentic situations. Knowledge is built through testing ideas, discussion with teachers and peers, and direct interaction with scientific phenomena. In fostering a practical, hands-on approach, IBSE can lead to a 'minds-on' comprehension of scientific concepts.

INQUIRE's partner institutions will offer IBSE training and support to teachers and educators and help them become reflective practitioners. The participation of two of Europe's leading science education research institutions — King's College, London and the University of Bremen BRD — is also critical, providing an analytical framework and standards benchmark for the programme.

Biodiversity loss and global climate change, among the major scientific as well as political challenges of our age, are core INQUIRE concerns. It is envisaged that, with IBSE training, teachers will be encouraged to find engaging, innovative and practical approaches to these subjects through both formal and informal (Learning Outside the Classroom) education systems.

INQUIRE will be delivered by its partners through the teaching CPD structures of their respective countries, as well as using informal training networks. In Tirol the Pädagogische Hochschule (PHT) is the strong partner to facilitate this process. An interactive website is being designed to promote IBSE and encourage dialogue between partners and teachers.

NewsPsychology (Mar. 4, 2011) — Differences in the way male and female learning has evolved have been revealed by new research into gibbons, conducted by the University of Abertay Dundee.

Female gibbons benefited significantly from having access to a tool before being tested on using the tool to retrieve food. However, the males showed no beneficial learning effects at all.

The researchers believe that the potential dangers of new objects or new situations to females — particularly if they are pregnant or caring for young infants — have given an evolutionary advantage to being cautious. Male gibbons, who lack the same 'reproductive costs', by contrast seem to have evolved no such caution.

Dr Clare Cunningham, a psychology lecturer at Abertay University who led the research, said: "This result was a genuine surprise to us, as we'd not expected such a large difference with the females who had the learning opportunity before we conducted the test.

"We found that female gibbons who had no experience of the tool before being tested took almost three times as long to successfully use the tool to retrieve food from behind a barrier."

The researchers also discovered that having access to the rake-like tool before testing did not increase the likelihood of success.

Interestingly, the male gibbons who had previous experience of the tool actually took much longer during the test to approach the tool and try to retrieve the tool, suggesting that males are less interested in objects they have previously experienced.

Clare added: "We believe that female gibbons who are more cautious to new objects and new situations may have an evolutionary advantage, resulting in a greater likelihood of survival and their cautious dispositions being passed on to the next generation.

"The research is very exciting, as it opens up a whole range of new questions for us to consider. For instance, have other species — like humans — also evolved with this same sex difference to learning? If so, this could be a very important study indeed."

The research was conducted at the Gibbon Conservation Centre in Santa Clarita, California, which works to ensure the survival of this endangered ape through conservation and scientific research.

The research is published online in the journal Animal Cognition, and is forthcoming in print.

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Journal Reference:

1. Clare Cunningham, James Anderson, Alan Mootnick. A sex difference in effect of prior experience on object-mediated problem-solving in gibbons. Animal Cognition, 2011; DOI: 10.1007/s10071-011-0380-y

One of the reasons often given by people for not attempting first aid in emergency situations is a lack of confidence and a fear of doing more harm than good. Yet a Norwegian study on four and five year olds published in BioMed Central's open access journal Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine shows that even young children are able to learn and perform basic first aid.

Pre-school children at a kindergarten in Bergen, Norway, were taught first aid using the 'five-finger-rule' system: look at the person, talk to them, touch them to try to wake them up, call emergency services, and lastly, stay and give comfort. The children also learnt how to put each other into recovery position and how to keep an airway open.

Dr Bollig from Department of Surgical Sciences, Haukeland University Hospital, explained, "Two months later the children were still able to work out whether a person was unconscious or asleep and whether an accident victim was breathing. The children could also remember the phone number of the emergency services and accurately describe their location." In a separate test, when one of their teachers pretended to lose consciousness the children acted as a group to put her into recovery position.

Dr Bollig suggested, "First aid training should begin in the kindergarten, via play, and be reinforced throughout school to increase confidence and encourage people to provide first aid should the need arise."

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Journal Reference:

1. Georg Bollig, Anne G Myklebust, and Kristin Østringen. Effects of first aid training in the kindergarten – a pilot study. Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine, (in press) [link]

 In a finding that once again displays the power of the female, UCSF neuroscientists have discovered that teenage male songbirds, still working to perfect their song, improve their performance in the presence of a female bird.

The finding sheds light on how social cues can impact the process of learning, the researchers said, and, specifically, could offer insights into the way humans learn speech and other motor skills. It also could inform strategies for rehabilitating people with motor disorders or brain injuries.

The study was reported in a recent early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like humans, songbirds learn to sing by first listening to adult birds and then mimicking those sounds through a process of trial-and-error. Their initial vocalizations are akin to the babbling of babies.

Until now, scientists and bird watchers alike have thought that young birds could only produce immature song. However, in a process that involved recording and studying male zebra finch song, the scientists discovered that, in the presence of a female, the birds sang much better than when they were practicing their song alone.

"We were very surprised by the finding," said senior author Allison Doupe, MD, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and physiology and a member of the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF. "The birds picked the best version of the song that they could possibly perform and they sang it over and over again. They sounded almost like adults. It turns out that teenagers know more than they're telling us."

Normally, the young birds' song is quite poor because they are practicing their vocalization through the trial-and-error process, said the first author of the study, Satoshi Kojima, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Doupe lab. "Something must be happening in response to a reinforcing social cue that allows them to pick out and produce their best possible performance. This demonstrates the power of social cues to shape brain behavior."

The finding could lead to a better understanding of the brain mechanisms supporting language acquisition as well as many other learned behaviors, said Doupe.

"We know that variation by trial and error is an important part of the learning process," said Doupe. "But discovering precisely how social cues influence motor production during song learning in birds could shed light on the brain mechanisms that underlie similar processes in humans learning how to speak, and potentially allow scientists and clinicians to harness these mechanisms when learning is not progressing properly."

Social cues are well known to powerfully influence the processing and production of human speech. A 2003 study by Michael Goldstein and colleagues showed that, in the presence of their mothers, babies' babbling improves. The current study underscores the usefulness of songbirds as a model for understanding the brain mechanisms underlying social modulation of language learning and other motor skills.

Like other songbirds, when they are fully adult, zebra finches sing two types of tunes: undirected, which they sing when alone, and directed, which is slightly more precise, and is favored by females. Adolescent male songbirds, which are just becoming sexually mature, usually sing undirected song, which at that stage is highly variable and immature and sounds like vocal practice.

In their study, the UCSF scientists coaxed the adolescent males to sing directed, courtship song towards females, and analyzed these songs using quantitative computer software. In the undirected context, the birds' song was variable, with low similarity to their final recorded adult song. In the directed context, the song was similar in syllable structure and sequence to that of the adult song.

The finding points to the importance of trial and error in motor learning as a means of perfecting vocalizations, said Doupe. "In the process of learning song, birds must develop their motor neurons to effectively mimic what they've heard. The variability that characterizes the imperfect youthful song of teenage birds is generated by basal ganglia circuits, and it's what allows birds to experiment to find what works best.

"Our finding suggests that, though teenage birds have the ability to produce more complex songs, they are only able to do so on a social cue. "It's possible that the social cue somehow turns off the variability that is responsible for improving vocal learning," she said.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

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Journal Reference:

1. S. Kojima, A. J. Doupe. Social performance reveals unexpected vocal competency in young songbirds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; 108 (4): 1687 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1010502108

Age alters memory. But in what ways, and why? These questions comprise a vast puzzle for neurologists and psychologists. A new study looked at one puzzle piece: how older and younger adults encode and recall distracting, or irrelevant, information. The results, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science, can help scientists better understand memory and aging.

"Our world contains so much information; we don't always know which is relevant and which is irrelevant," said Nigel Gopie, who cowrote the study with Fergus I.M. Craik and Lynn Hasher, all from the University of Toronto's Rotman Research Institute. Most psychological scientists have focused on the relevant: on learning what we intend to learn. But the background noise also gets into our heads and influences our behavior — differently at different ages.

The study recruited about 125 subjects, in two groups, average ages 19 and 69. It tested two kinds of memory: "implicit" memory, which influences behavior without awareness, such as purchasing the snacks we've seen "product-placed" in a film; and "explicit" memory, the kind we enlist to reconstruct a shopping list left at home.

At the start, participants pressed buttons in response to the colors of words and random letter strings on a screen. What mattered was the color; the words themselves were irrelevant. Then they were instructed to complete word fragments. In one test, the earlier task wasn't mentioned; this accessed implicit memory. In the other, the subjects were told to use words from the color task to complete the fragments, employing explicit memory.

The older people showed better implicit than explicit memory and better implicit memory than the younger. In the younger participants the pattern was reversed: better explicit than implicit memory and better explicit memory than their elders.

"We believe younger people remember in deep, elaborative ways: conceptually" — spontaneously creating semantic or imaginary associations among words and ideas, said Gopie. To find the study's words, "they had to search." They used explicit memory.

"Older people encode things 'perceptually,' in a more sensory way," he continued. They also don't filter out irrelevant stimuli. All of the information ends up "all over the place," and is more accessible in the implicit mode. When trying to remember explicitly — say, a person's name — elders are often stumped.

This shallower processing may be related to a decline in mental "resources" as we age. To test this, the researchers "made the younger people more like the older people" by taking away some of their resources. While performing the color task, participants had to listen to numbers and say the second of any two consecutive odd numbers aloud. While their attention was divided, the younger people performed as their elders did: better on implicit than explicit memory.

The study suggests potential uses from age-specific marketing to assisting older learners. But it offers immediate lessons, too. "We're learning all the time, whether we know it or not," says Gopie. But we have only so much brain to process the information. When distracted, younger adults behaved just like older adults.

The article is titled, " Double Dissociation of Implicit and Explicit Memory in Young and Older Adults."

Why, and when, do we learn to speak the way that we do? Research from North Carolina State University on African-American children presents an unexpected finding: language use can go on a roller-coaster ride during childhood as kids adopt and abandon vernacular language patterns.

"We found that there is a 'roller-coaster effect,' featuring an ebb and flow in a child's use of vernacular English over the course of his or her language development," says Dr. Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor of English Linguistics at NC State and co-author of several recent papers describing the research. "This was totally unanticipated." Vernacular English is defined here as culturally specific speech patterns that are distinct from standard English; in this case, the vernacular is African-American English (AAE).

One implication of the finding involves education, since teachers often advocate teaching standard English early in a childhood education. "This approach does seem to work at first," Wolfram says, "but it doesn't last." In other words, if a school system wants its students to graduate high school with a strong foundation in standard English, it may have to revisit standard English later in the education curriculum.

Specifically, the researchers found that children come to school speaking English with a relatively high number of vernacular features. Then, through the first four grades of elementary school, those features are reduced, as children adopt more standard English language patterns. As the children move toward middle school, the level of vernacular rises — though many children often reduce their use of vernacular again as they enter high school.

"This finding reveals a cyclic pattern in the use of African-American vernacular English that no one expected to see during children's language development," says Janneke Van Hofwegen, a research associate at NC State and co-author of the study. "This wasn't even a hypothesis when we began the study."

The researchers note that, while their data looked solely at African-American children, the findings may be applicable more broadly to other groups.

The research stems from the longest, and largest, study ever to examine the longitudinal development of language in African-American children. The study began in 1990, following 88 African-American children from central North Carolina in order to track their language development. The study is ongoing, with 68 of the original participants still being tracked. The data is collected by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute in Chapel Hill, N. C.

The retention rate of the participants is remarkably high, particularly given that approximately 71 percent of the children were living below the poverty line in 1990. "It's incredible, and gives us a rare opportunity to study language development in children," Wolfram says.

The study also gives researchers an impressive array of data, providing them with access to school and test data, as well as the data collected through the study's own interviews and surveys.

Researchers are currently assessing how and whether dialect use is related to literacy skills, as well as the role that mothers play in their children's use of vernacular.

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Journal References:

1. Wolfram, Walt, Janneke Van Hofwegen, Mary Kohn, Jennifer Renn. Trajectories of Development in AAE: The First 17 Years. Proceedings of the Conference on African American Language in Popular Culture, (in press)
2. Janneke Van Hofwegen, Walt Wolfram. Coming of age in African American English: A longitudinal study. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2010; 14 (4): 427 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2010.00452.x

— Two students from the Terrassa School of Engineering have designed an innovative augmented reality system for learning to play chess that combines augmented reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence.

An ordinary webcam, a chess board, a set of 32 pieces and custom software are the key elements in the final degree project of the telecommunications engineering students Ivan Paquico and Cristina Palmero, from the UPC-Barcelona Tech's Terrassa School of Engineering (EET). The project, for which the students were awarded a distinction, was directed by the professor Jordi Voltas and completed during an international mobility placement in Finland.

The system created by Ivan Paquico, the 2001 Spanish Internet chess champion, and Cristina Palmero, a keen player and federation member, is a didactic tool that will help chess clubs and associations to teach the game and make it more appealing, particularly to younger players.

The system combines augmented reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence, and the only equipment required is a high-definition home webcam, the Augmented Reality Chess software, a standard board and pieces, and a set of cardboard markers the same size as the squares on the board, each marked with the first letter of the corresponding piece: R for the king (rei in Catalan), D for the queen (dama), T for the rooks (torres), A for the bishops (alfils), C for the knights (cavalls) and P for the pawns (peons).

Learning chess with virtual pieces

To use the system, learners play with an ordinary chess board but move the cardboard markers instead of standard pieces. The table is lit from above and the webcam focuses on the board, and every time the player moves one of the markers the system recognises the piece and reproduces the move in 3D on the computer screen, creating a virtual representation of the game.

For example, if the learner moves the marker P (pawn), the corresponding piece will be displayed on the screen in 3D, with all of the possible moves indicated. This is a simple and attractive way of showing novices the permitted movements of each piece, making the system particularly suitable for children learning the basics of this board game.

Making chess accessible to all

The learning tool also incorporates a move-tracking program called Chess Recognition: from the images captured by the webcam, the system instantly recognises and analyses every movement of every piece and can act as a referee, identify illegal moves and provide the players with an audible description of the game status. According to Ivan Paquico and Cristina Palmero, this feature could be very useful for players with visual impairment — who have their own federation and, until now, have had to play with specially adapted boards and pieces — and for clubs and federations, tournament organisers and enthusiasts of all levels.

The Chess Recognition program saves whole games so that they can be shared, broadcast online and viewed on demand, and can generate a complete user history for analysing the evolution of a player's game. The program also creates an automatic copy of the scoresheet (the official record of each game) for players to view or print.

The technology for playing chess and recording games online has been available for a number of years, but until now players needed sophisticated equipment including pieces with integrated chips and a special electronic board with a USB connection. The standard retail cost of this equipment is between 400 and 500 euros.