A model of basal ganglia for automaticity in categorization tasks
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1
Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany
Dividing objects into categories is one of the remarkable human abilities, but its neuronal basis (Seger & Miller, 2010) and its impressive fast execution is still little understood. After several repetitions of the same categorization task, the speed of the decision process increases. This mechanism is called automaticity (Ashby et al., 2010). The neuronal foundations for categorization are the Basal Ganglia (BG) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) which are connected via thalamocortical loops (Seger & Miller, 2010). The associate loop, which contains the most category specific cells, is formed by prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus (CN), globus pallidus internal segment (GPi) and thalamus (Thal) and it is driven by visual cells in inferior temporal cortex (IT). We will present a model which simulates the shift of the neuronal activation patterns during automaticity as observed by Antzoulatos & Miller (2012) in a prototype-distortion categorization task (Seger & Miller, 2010). Initially (pre-automatic phase), primarily the neurons of caudate nucleus react to specific categories. But after many repetitions (automatic phase), neurons in the caudate nucleus show no longer category specific responses, instead the cells in the prefrontal cortex become category specific (Antzoulatos & Miller, 2012; Ashby et al., 2010). We propose that after the emergence of these category-specific cells in prefrontal cortex, cortical-cortical connections will be developed between prefrontal and premotor cortex (PM) due to Hebbian learning. This induces the profitable decrease of reaction times, because the information processing chain is shifted from IT->PFC->CN->GPi->Thal->PM (pre-automatic phase) to the shorter and hence faster inter-cortical chain IT->PFC->PM (automatic phase). Therefore, our model simulates these inter-cortical connections, the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc), Dopamine releases and the direct pathways of the associate and of the motor loop. In summary, the model, which is an advancement of our earlier work (Schroll et al., 2012), clarifies the neuronal activation pattern in the Basal Ganglia and the cortex during a prototype-distortion categorization task and its shift during automaticity.
Acknowledgements
The poster was support by the DFG-grant HA2630/4-2 "A neurocomputational systems approach to modeling the cognitive guidance of attention and object/category recognition (Followup grant)".
Keywords:
automaticity,
Basal Ganglia,
Categorization,
Corticocortical connection,
Explicit learning,
Prefrontal Cortex,
Striatum
Conference:
Bernstein Conference 2012, Munich, Germany, 12 Sep - 14 Sep, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Learning, plasticity, memory
Citation:
Beuth
F,
Schroll
H,
Vitay
J and
Hamker
FH
(2012). A model of basal ganglia for automaticity in categorization tasks.
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Bernstein Conference 2012.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fncom.2012.55.00198
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Received:
11 May 2012;
Published Online:
12 Sep 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Frederik Beuth, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, 09107, Germany, beuth@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de