The necessity of the medial temporal lobe for statistical learning. Schapiro, A. C., Gregory, E., Landau, B., McCloskey, M., & Turk-Browne, N. B. J Cogn Neurosci, 26(8):1736–1747, 2014.
doi  abstract   bibtex   
The sensory input that we experience is highly patterned, and we are experts at detecting these regularities. Although the extraction of such regularities, or statistical learning (SL), is typically viewed as a cortical process, recent studies have implicated the medial temporal lobe (MTL), including the hippocampus. These studies have employed fMRI, leaving open the possibility that the MTL is involved but not necessary for SL. Here, we examined this issue in a case study of LSJ, a patient with complete bilateral hippocampal loss and broader MTL damage. In Experiments 1 and 2, LSJ and matched control participants were passively exposed to a continuous sequence of shapes, syllables, scenes, or tones containing temporal regularities in the co-occurrence of items. In a subsequent test phase, the control groups exhibited reliable SL in all conditions, successfully discriminating regularities from recombinations of the same items into novel foil sequences. LSJ, however, exhibited no SL, failing to discriminate regularities from foils. Experiment 3 ruled out more general explanations for this failure, such as inattention during exposure or difficulty following test instructions, by showing that LSJ could discriminate which individual items had been exposed. These findings provide converging support for the importance of the MTL in extracting temporal regularities.
@Article{Schapiro2014,
  author      = {Schapiro, Anna C. and Gregory, Emma and Landau, Barbara and McCloskey, Michael and Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.},
  journal     = {J Cogn Neurosci},
  title       = {The necessity of the medial temporal lobe for statistical learning.},
  year        = {2014},
  number      = {8},
  pages       = {1736--1747},
  volume      = {26},
  abstract    = {The sensory input that we experience is highly patterned, and we are
	experts at detecting these regularities. Although the extraction
	of such regularities, or statistical learning (SL), is typically
	viewed as a cortical process, recent studies have implicated the
	medial temporal lobe (MTL), including the hippocampus. These studies
	have employed fMRI, leaving open the possibility that the MTL is
	involved but not necessary for SL. Here, we examined this issue in
	a case study of LSJ, a patient with complete bilateral hippocampal
	loss and broader MTL damage. In Experiments 1 and 2, LSJ and matched
	control participants were passively exposed to a continuous sequence
	of shapes, syllables, scenes, or tones containing temporal regularities
	in the co-occurrence of items. In a subsequent test phase, the control
	groups exhibited reliable SL in all conditions, successfully discriminating
	regularities from recombinations of the same items into novel foil
	sequences. LSJ, however, exhibited no SL, failing to discriminate
	regularities from foils. Experiment 3 ruled out more general explanations
	for this failure, such as inattention during exposure or difficulty
	following test instructions, by showing that LSJ could discriminate
	which individual items had been exposed. These findings provide converging
	support for the importance of the MTL in extracting temporal regularities.},
  doi         = {10.1162/jocn_a_00578},
  institution = {Princeton University.},
  keywords    = {Aged; Brain Damage, Chronic, etiology/pathology/physiopathology; Encephalitis, Herpes Simplex, complications; Female; Hippocampus, pathology/physiopathology; Humans; Learning, physiology; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Middle Aged; Pattern Recognition, Physiological, physiology; Random Allocation; Temporal Lobe, pathology/physiopathology},
  language    = {eng},
  medline-pst = {ppublish},
  pmid        = {24456393},
  timestamp   = {2015.11.05},
}

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