Up and down the frontal hierarchies; whither Broca's area?

An anatomically structured sensory-motor sequence learning system displays some general linguistic capacities

The capacity in primates to master temporal-sequential constraints from the external world might provide a basis for accommodating similar constraints in language. While the neural specialization required for language clearly distinguishes man from the other primates, it is less clear to what extent this specialization constitutes a drastic neurophysiological divergence versus a variation on an existing sequencing capability. In an effort to address this issue, an anatomically structured neural network model, previously developed to reproduce complex sensory-motor sequences and the corresponding single-unit recordings from primate prefrontal cortex, is studied in a simple linguistic context. The model is presented sentences from a small language and demonstrates a simple capacity to "understand" and generalize at different levels. Interactions between variations on (a) the model architecture and (b) the target language structure agree with data from crosslinguistic aphasia studies. These results support the hypothesis that a brain architecture for nonlinguistic cognitive functions (in this case sensory-motor sequencing) can provide a basis for a general sequence processing component of linguistic function.

Analogical transfer is effective in a serial reaction time task in Parkinson's disease: evidence for a dissociable form of sequence learning

Several studies of procedural learning in Parkinson's disease (PD) have demonstrated that these patients are impaired with respect to age-matched control subjects. In order to examine more closely the specific impairment, we considered three dimensions along which a procedural learning task could vary. These are: (1) implicit vs explicit learning, (2) instance vs rule learning, and (3) learning with internal vs external error correction. We consider two hypotheses that could explain the impairments observed in PD for different types of explicit motor learning: (H1) an impairment related to the acquisition of rules vs specific instances, and (H2) an impairment in learning when no explicit error feedback is provided. In order to examine the condition of rule learning with external error feedback, we developed a modified version of the serial reaction time (SRT) protocol that tests analogical transfer in sequence learning (ATSL). Reaction times are measured for responses to visual stimuli that appear in several different repeating sequences. While these isomorphic sequences are different, they share a common rule. Verbatim learning of a sequence would result in negative transfer from one sequence to a different one, while rule learning would result in positive transfer. Parkinson's patients and age-matched controls demonstrate significant acquisition and positive transfer of the rule between sequences. Our results demonstrate that PD patients are capable of learning and transferring rule or schema-based representations in an explicit learning format, and that this form of learning may be functionally distinct from learning mechanisms that rely on representations of the verbatim or statistical structure of sequences.