Absentmindedness and the inability to find car keys has become an expected by-product of pregnancy and motherhood but an Australian National University study says pregnancy brain is no more than a common myth. The research, published in the February 2010 British Journal of Psychiatry, was led by Professor Helen Christensen of the Centre for Mental Health Research at ANU. Professor Christensen's team wanted to determine whether pregnancy and motherhood are associated with brief or long-term cognitive deterioration as previous research has claimed. They recruited 1241 women, aged 20-24, who were not pregnant at the time. The women were assessed on four areas of cognition: cognitive speed, working memory, and immediate and delayed recall. At four-year intervals in 2003 and 2007 the women were given the same tests. Seventy-six women were pregnant at follow-up assessments and 188 became mothers between study waves. The research concluded there was no evidence that a woman's brain power is affected by pregnancy or motherhood.  The researchers suggest the strength of the study over previous ones was in the testing of the women prior to pregnancy. Professor Christensen says that mothers are primed to look out for signs of ‘baby brain’: “Part of the problem is that pregnancy manuals tell women they are likely to experience memory and concentration problems, so women and their partners are primed to attribute any memory lapse to the ‘hard to miss’ physical sign of pregnancy.”