The involvement of the primate frontal cortex-basal ganglia system in arbitrary visuomotor association learning

It is the goal of this thesis to examine the frontal cortex-basal ganglia system during arbitrary visuomotor association learning, the forming of arbitrary links between visual stimuli and motor responses (e.g. red means stop), a fundamental learning process that underlies much of our complex behavior such as written language. The experiments contained in this thesis investigate the involvement of four components of this system in the acquisition of these associations: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), caudate nucleus (Cd), frontal eye field (FEF), and the internal segment of the globus pallidus (GPi). Extracellular electrophysiological recordings were performed in awake-behaving primates performing three different learning tasks. In the different behavioral paradigms used in these studies, learning with and without reversals is investigated and compared both directly within the same experiment and indirectly across experiments. The results of these studies suggest that a complex interplay between brain areas in the frontal cortex-basal ganglia system exists. The study of FEF during reversal learning revealed that FEF contains task-related information from the start of learning, suggesting that it may be passing information onto PFC and Cd to aid the learning process. In addition, GPi is shown to contain more specific information about the learned association during the reversal task, providing evidence for an increase in the complexity of information processing through the basal ganglia.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Machon, Michelle S

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Earl K. Miller.

• Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46816

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/46816