Neuronal representations of stimulus associations develop in the temporal lobe during learning.

Autor: Messinger A; Systems Neurobiology Laboratories, The Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA., Squire LR, Zola SM, Albright TD
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A] 2001 Oct 09; Vol. 98 (21), pp. 12239-44. Date of Electronic Publication: 2001 Sep 25.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.211431098
Abstrakt: Visual stimuli that are frequently seen together become associated in long-term memory, such that the sight of one stimulus readily brings to mind the thought or image of the other. It has been hypothesized that acquisition of such long-term associative memories proceeds via the strengthening of connections between neurons representing the associated stimuli, such that a neuron initially responding only to one stimulus of an associated pair eventually comes to respond to both. Consistent with this hypothesis, studies have demonstrated that individual neurons in the primate inferior temporal cortex tend to exhibit similar responses to pairs of visual stimuli that have become behaviorally associated. In the present study, we investigated the role of these areas in the formation of conditional visual associations by monitoring the responses of individual neurons during the learning of new stimulus pairs. We found that many neurons in both area TE and perirhinal cortex came to elicit more similar neuronal responses to paired stimuli as learning proceeded. Moreover, these neuronal response changes were learning-dependent and proceeded with an average time course that paralleled learning. This experience-dependent plasticity of sensory representations in the cerebral cortex may underlie the learning of associations between objects.
Databáze: MEDLINE