The Functional Circuitry of Category Learning

描述（由申请人提供）：NIH广泛挑战领域15-转化科学NIMH特定挑战主题15- mh -109 -高级脑功能和复杂行为的前额皮质调节。抽象是在忽略无关细节的情况下检测和存储经验共性的能力。它是一种重要的认知功能，因为它通过赋予概括和预测，为世界注入意义和秩序。如果没有这种至关重要的能力，经验将是碎片化和不相关的。感觉输入看起来很奇怪和不熟悉，因为它们在外观上与以前的经验不同。换句话说，我们会有精神分裂症患者的思维紊乱，或者自闭症患者无法概括。虽然最近的各种研究已经检查了一系列大脑区域中神经相关物的分布和其他特性，但这些研究都检查了动物已经熟悉的类别。实际上，对于大脑如何以及在哪里获得新的分类，我们一无所知。我们的实验室将使用一种广泛应用于人类的类别学习测试，并使用我们独特的方法，同时从猴子大脑的不同区域的许多电极上记录下来。通过记录已知在分类中起作用的三个大脑区域（前额叶皮层、后顶叶皮层和基底神经节），我们将确定类别是如何以及在哪里学习的，例如它们首先出现的位置，它们是如何从学习个体范例中形成的。我们将测试一个假设，即新的任意类别首先是由前额皮质获得的，以及前额皮质通过将纹状体学习到的范例放在一起形成类别的假设。这将在几个方面帮助美国经济复苏。这笔资金将用于保留科学人员的就业，并将通过增加微型驱动器制造的兼职劳动力和从美国公司购买相应的用品来促进经济。我们的实验室受到了当前经济危机的严重影响。当皮考尔基金会（Picower Foundation）在伯尼•麦道夫（Bernie Madoff）庞氏骗局丑闻中倒闭时，我们突然失去了一个资金来源。这笔资金还将用于保留一名博士后的服务，否则，由于资金损失，该博士后将不得不在今年夏天被解雇。最后，也许是最重要的，我们已经（并将继续）与其他实验室自由分享我们的微驱动器设计和方法，其中一些已经采用了我们的系统。因此，我们补充的经济（和科学）结果很可能是“病毒式”的，激励其他人采用多电极技术，从而进行类似的购买。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): NIH Broad Challenge Area 15 - Translational Science NIMH Specific Challenge Topic 15-MH-109 - Prefrontal cortex regulation of higher brain function and complex behaviors. Abstraction is the ability to detect and store the commonalities across experiences while ignoring irrelevant details. It is a critical cognitive function because imbues the world with meaning and orders thought by endowing generalization and prediction. Without this crucial faculty, experiences would be fragmented and unrelated. Sensory inputs would seem strange and unfamiliar because they differ in appearance from previous experience. In other words, we would have the disordered thought of schizophrenics or the inability to generalize seen in autistics. While a variety of recent studies have examined the distribution and other properties of neural correlates across a range of brain areas, these studies have all examined categories that were already familiar to the animal. Virtually nothing is known about how and where the brain acquires new categories. Our laboratory will do so by using a test of category learning widely employed in humans and by using our unique approach of recording from many electrodes simultaneously in different areas of the monkey brain. By recording from three brain areas known to play a role in categorization (the prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and basal ganglia), we will determine the how and where of how categories are learned, such as where they first arise, how they are formed from learning about individual exemplars. We will test the hypothesis that new, arbitrary categories are first acquired by the prefrontal cortex and the hypothesis that the prefrontal cortex forms categories by putting together exemplars learned by the striatum. This will help aid the U.S. economic recovery in several ways. The funds will be used to retain employment of scientific personnel and will also aid the economy via increased part-time labor for the manufacturing of microdrives and corresponding purchases of supplies from U.S. based companies. Our lab has been acutely impacted by the current economic crisis. We suddenly lost a source of funding when The Picower Foundation collapsed in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scandal. The funds will also be used to retain the services of a postdoctoral fellow who will otherwise have to be laid off this summer due to this loss of funding. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have (and will continue to) freely share our microdrive design and methodology with other laboratories, several of which have adopted our system. Thus, the economic (and scientific) results of our supplement are likely to be "viral", inspiring others to adopt multiple-electrode technology and thus make similar purchases. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: We will use multiple-electrode technology to determine the functional circuitry of category learning in the monkey brain. By recording from multiple brain areas simultaneously, we will determine where, when, and how categories are acquired by the brain.