The Functional Circuitry of Category Learning

描述(由申请者提供)：NIH广泛挑战领域15-翻译科学NIMH特定挑战主题15-MH-109-大脑高级功能和复杂行为的前额叶皮质调节。抽象是一种在忽略无关细节的情况下发现和存储经验中的共性的能力。它是一种批判性的认知功能，因为它通过赋予概括和预测赋予世界意义和秩序思维。如果没有这一至关重要的能力，经历将是支离破碎和无关的。感觉输入会显得奇怪和陌生，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无序思维，或者无法概括自闭症患者的情况。虽然最近的各种研究都检查了神经关联在一系列大脑区域的分布和其他特性，但这些研究都检查了动物已经熟悉的类别。事实上，对于大脑如何以及在哪里获得新的类别，我们一无所知。我们的实验室将使用在人类中广泛使用的类别学习测试，并使用我们独特的方法，即同时从猴子大脑不同区域的多个电极进行记录。通过从三个已知在分类中起作用的大脑区域(前额叶皮质、后顶叶皮质和基底节)进行记录，我们将确定如何以及在哪里学习类别，例如它们第一次出现在哪里，它们是如何通过学习个别样本形成的。我们将检验这样的假设，即新的任意类别首先由前额叶皮质获得，以及前额叶皮质通过将纹状体学习的样本组合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，并将通过增加制造微型驱动器的兼职劳动力和从美国公司购买相应的物资来帮助经济。我们的实验室受到了当前经济危机的严重影响。当皮考尔基金会在伯尼·马多夫庞氏丑闻中倒闭时，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研究员的服务，否则他将不得不在今年夏天因资金损失而被解雇。最后，也许最重要的是，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，其中几个实验室已经采用了我们的系统。因此，我们补充剂的经济(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。 公共卫生相关性：我们将使用多电极技术来确定猴子大脑中类别学习的功能回路。通过同时从多个大脑区域进行记录，我们将确定大脑在哪里、何时以及如何获得类别。

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.