Dissociating medial temporal and basal ganglia systems with a latent learning task.

Myers, Catherine F, Shohamy, Daphna, Gluck, Mark A., Grossman, Steven, Onlaor, Somporn and Kapur, Narinder (2003) Dissociating medial temporal and basal ganglia systems with a latent learning task. Neuropsychologia, 41 (14), 1919-1928. (doi:10.1016/S0028-3932(03)00127-1).

Abstract

The medial temporal (MT) lobes and basal ganglia have both been implicated as brain substrates of associative learning. Here, we show a dissociation between medial temporal and basal ganglia damage using a latent learning task, in which prior exposure to cues, uncorrelated with each other, slows subsequent learning of an association between them. Consistent with prior work, we found a robust exposure effect in healthy controls, with exposed controls learning more slowly than non-exposed controls. This effect was abolished in medial temporal amnesia: both exposed and non-exposed amnesic patients learned at the same speed. A group of patients with basal ganglia damage due to Parkinson’s disease showed a reversal of the effect: exposed subjects learned faster than non-exposed subjects. Our findings point to distinct and dissociable contributions of medial temporal lobe and basal ganglia structures to learning and memory.

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