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Avoidance conditioning in amnesia: a single case experimental study.

We present a single case study of avoidance conditioning in a seriously amnesic patient with bilateral ischemic lesions of the brain. A four-path maze was used for conditioning. The procedure consisted in an aversive stimulus that the patient received every time he traced one of the four maze-paths connected to an electric shock generator with a stylus. Using a single case experimental design A-B-A, we found that the patient learned to avoid the path connected to the electric shock, although he never showed awareness of this. Our study confirms once again that conditioning is one of the residual learning capabilities in amnesic patients. Different neural systems are probably involved in conditioning processes.

Amnesia↗

Learning effects on event-related brain potentials.

This study investigates whether learning can manifest itself in EEG changes without explicit awareness of the acquired knowledge and without any motor requirement (to rule out acquisition of motor skills). Subjects passively heard particular stimulus combinations interspersed with random combinations. Immediately after this, stimulus combinations were presented which contained violations of the previously learned regular sequences. These violations elicited two frontally distributed negative waves peaked at about 250 ms and 500 ms, respectively. None of the participants could detect any regularity of the stimulation. No significant difference between regular vs random stimulus combinations was found during acquisition. These findings indicate that learning without explicit knowledge does not require motor activity (i.e. is independent of learning response sequences) and does not depend on stimulus probabilities.

Adult↗

The discrimination of relative frequency by pigeons.

Five experiments addressed the issue of how pigeons learn to discriminate the relative frequency of stimuli. During a sampling period, three different stimuli (keylights) were presented serially, in mixed order, and with different frequencies. During a choice period, the stimuli were presented simultaneously, and reinforcement was arranged for choosing the stimulus that was presented the least number of times during the sample. The results showed that (a) the overall proportion of correct choices was always above chance levels; (b) the likelihood of a correct choice decreased with the serial position of the correct stimulus, a negative recency effect; (c) when the last three stimuli of the sample were constrained to be one of each kind, the negative recency effect decreased but errors became more likely when the correct stimulus occurred early in the sample, a negative primacy effect; (d) accurate performance generalized to new and larger samples; and (e) under some conditions the probability of a correct choice was independent of the serial position of the correct stimulus. The serial position curves suggest that in a least frequent discrimination task, two processes determine how the least frequent stimulus controls behavior: a passive decay process (the stimulus loses its effectiveness with time since its last occurrence), and a residual salience process (when the stimulus occurs in the first position it may decay to a higher asymptote than when it occurs in later positions.

Animals↗

How is the serial order of a verbal sequence coded? Some comparisons between models.

Current models of verbal short-term memory (STM) propose various mechanisms for serial order. These include a gradient of activation over items, associations between items, and associations between items and their positions relative to the start or end of a sequence. We compared models using a variant of Hebb's procedure in which immediate serial recall of a sequence improves if the sequence is presented more than once. However, instead of repeating a complete sequence, we repeated different aspects of serial order information common to training lists and a subsequent test list. In Experiment 1, training lists repeated all the item-item pairings in the test list, with or without the position-item pairings in the test list. Substantial learning relative to a control condition was observed only when training lists repeated item-item pairs with position-item pairs, and position was defined relative to the start rather than end of a sequence. Experiment 2 attempted to analyse the basis of this learning effect further by repeating fragments of the test list during training, where fragments consisted of either isolated position-item pairings or clusters of both position-item and item-item pairings. Repetition of sequence fragments led to only weak learning effects. However, where learning was observed it was for specific position-item pairings. We conclude that positional cues play an important role in the coding of serial order in memory but that the information required to learn a sequence goes beyond position-item associations. We suggest that whereas STM for a novel sequence is based on positional cues, learning a sequence involves the development of some additional representation of the sequence as a whole.

Adolescent↗

Knowing before doing: discrimination by rats of a brief interruption of a tone.

Eight rats' lever presses were reinforced after an interruption in a tone, provided the lever had not been pressed before the tone interruption. After a few sessions, long before the animals reliably refrained from lever pressing before the interruption, the latencies of postinterruption presses (time from the termination of the interruption to the moment of the lever press) dissociated into two classes: short ones for to-be-rewarded presses, and long ones for presses in the other trials, which contained no reward because one or more lever presses had occurred before the interruption. Thus discrimination of impending reinforcement in the current trial occurred before there was evidence of sensitivity to reinforcement in the reinforcement-producing aspect of behavior. This finding is related to Shimp's (1981) contention that the temporal properties of recent behavior are reinforceable, if remembered. The present finding shows that learning to discriminate whether one's behavior has met a contingency, and learning to carry out this behavior, need not go together, implying that memory of temporal properties is probably a necessary but not a sufficient condition for learning the latter.

Animals↗

Mathematical modelling of reaction latency. Part II: A model of escape reaction and escape learning.

The results of fitting the linear-dynamic-stochastic model to the latency data from escape conditioning experiment are presented. Two processes can be distinguished: (i) an increase in parameters of the dynamic part of the model (called the static gain and the dynamic gain) which results in a decrease in the reaction latency during learning, (ii) an increase in parameter of the decision part of the model (mean value of the threshold), which results simultaneously in an increase in the reaction latency and a decrease in the inter-trial responses probability. The reaction latency decreases during the learning because the first phenomenon prevails over the second one, but the latter is the only reason of inter-trial responses decrease during learning. Analysis of the results of surgical treatment on the learning process is also presented.

Animals↗

Decision making under uncertainty: a comparison of simple scalability, fixed-sample, and sequential-sampling models.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the learning and memory processes involved in decision making under uncertainty. In two different experiments, subjects were given a choice between a certain alternative that produced a single known payoff and an uncertain alternative that produced a normal distribution of payoffs. Initially this distribution was unknown, and in the first experiment it was learned through feedback from past decisions, whereas in the second experiment it was learned by observing sample outcomes. In the first experiment, a response deadline was used to limit the amount of time available for making a decision. In the second experiment, an observation cost was used to limit the number of samples that could be purchased. The mean and variance of the uncertain alternative and the value of the certain alternative were factorially manipulated to study their joint effects on choice probability, choice response time (Experiment 1), and number of observations purchased (Experiment 2). Algebraic-deterministic theories developed for decision making with simple gambles fail to explain the present results. Two new models are developed and tested--fixed- and sequential-sampling models--that attempt to describe the learning and memory processes involved in decision making under uncertainty.

Adult↗

Source analysis of the N2 in a cued Go/NoGo task.

Previous source analyses of event-related potential (ERP) data elicited in Go/NoGo tasks have suggested that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays an important role in response inhibition. So far, however, source models were derived for the difference wave Go stimulus minus NoGo stimulus. This difference wave is confounded with motor- and attention-related activity. To avoid these confounds, we alternatively derived source models for NoGo stimuli only. The problem of the NoGo-N2 being superimposed on a positive deflection was addressed in two ways. First, a baseline correction was applied using the time points just preceding and succeeding the NoGo-N2. Second, a separate source model was derived at the maximum amplitude of this positive deflection. Subjects were presented with a cued version of the continuous performance task (CPT; ABX). In a second study, the probability of the Go stimulus was gradually increased to heighten subjects' tendency to respond and, as a consequence, to enhance the amplitude of the NoGo-N2. The source models of the NoGo-N2 consistently indicated bilateral dipole pairs in medial frontal regions. This is in accordance with a generator in the anterior cingulate cortex.

Adult↗

Adaptive probabilistic neural networks for pattern classification in time-varying environment.

In this paper, we propose a new class of probabilistic neural networks (PNNs) working in nonstationary environment. The novelty is summarized as follows: 1) We formulate the problem of pattern classification in nonstationary environment as the prediction problem and design a probabilistic neural network to classify patterns having time-varying probability distributions. We note that the problem of pattern classification in the nonstationary case is closely connected with the problem of prediction because on the basis of a learning sequence of the length n, a pattern in the moment n + k, k > or = 1 should be classified. 2) We present, for the first time in literature, definitions of optimality of PNNs in time-varying environment. Moreover, we prove that our PNNs asymptotically approach the Bayes-optimal (time-varying) decision surface. 3) We investigate the speed of convergence of constructed PNNs. 4) We design in detail PNNs based on Parzen kernels and multivariate Hermite series.

Algorithms↗

Cerebral cholinergic neurotransmission in protein and tryptophan-restricted adult rats.

To evaluate the effects of protein and tryptophan restriction on cholinergic neurotransmission in terms of choline acetyltransferase (CAT) activity and its expression as well as muscarinic receptors number at cerebral cortex and hippocampus, Wistar rats were raised on a chronically protein and tryptophan restricted diets with 8% protein based on either Purina chow or corn. There was a significant decrease in both body and cerebral weight in the restricted animals compared with the control group fed with 23% protein diet. In cerebral cortex CAT activity and its expression were significantly increased in corn fed (C) versus protein restricted (HP) and control (T) animals, without no significant changes in muscarinic receptors number. On the other hand, hippocampus CAT activity and its expression were significantly lesser and muscarinic receptors significantly increased in C group and CAT activity in HP group was significantly increased without significant changes in muscarinic receptors related to T group. These results indicate that a reduction in 5-HT disponibility on brain induced by tryptophan restricted diet during development affects clearly the cholinergic system modifying probably the short term memory and learning.

Animals↗

Comparison of two unsupervised algorithms.

The binary decision element described by the decision rule depending upon weight vector w is a model of neuron examined in this paper. The environment of the element is described by some unknown, stationary distribution (p(kappa). The input signals kappa[n] of the element appear in each step n independently in accordance with the distribution p(kappa). During an unsupervised learning process the weight vector w[n] is changed on the base of the input vector kappa[n]. In the paper there are regarded two self-learning algorithms which are stochastic approximation type. For both algorithms the same rule of past experiences neglecting or the rule of weight decrease has been introduced. The first algorithm differs from the other one by a rule of weight increase. It has been proved that only one of these algorithms always leads to the same decision rule in a given environment p(kappa).

Decision Making↗