Acquiring the Knowledge of London's layout drives structural brain changes
Katherine Woollett and Eleanor Maguire followed trainee London taxi drivers through the training for the licence, known as the Knowledge, which typically takes three to four years, and scanned them before and after, alongside control participants who were not training. The trainees who qualified had more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus afterwards than before. Trainees who did not qualify, and the controls, showed no such change, and no change appeared in the anterior hippocampus. Qualified drivers performed worse than controls on some other memory tasks, such as recalling complex visual information.
Katherine Woollett and Eleanor Maguire followed trainee London taxi drivers through the training for the licence, known as the Knowledge, which typically takes three to four years, and scanned them before and after, alongside control participants who were not training. The trainees who qualified had more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus afterwards than before. Trainees who did not qualify, and the controls, showed no such change, and no change appeared in the anterior hippocampus. Qualified drivers performed worse than controls on some other memory tasks, such as recalling complex visual information.
Written from the author's copy of the paper and the Wellcome Trust press release, read 2026-10-26.
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Woollett, K., & Maguire, E. A. (2011). Acquiring the Knowledge of London's layout drives structural brain changes. Current Biology, 21(24), 2109-2114. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.018