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From: Boston University - CNS/CAS <cns-cas@PARK.BU.EDU>
Subject: TALK: Parallel Cerebral Memory Systems
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This week's guest speaker at the BU CAS/CNS Seminar series will
will be Dr. Mortimer Mishkin of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology 
at the NIMH.  The talk will be held on Friday, April 21 in room 
101 at 2 Cummington Street.  Refreshments will be served at 2:00 
in the same location.  

             "Parallel Cerebral Memory Systems"

                      Mortimer Mishkin
             National Institute of Mental Health
                   Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.   

Behaviorism and Cognitivism, two major schools of thought in
psychology, have championed very different principles of learning and
memory.  According to behaviorist views, learning is essentially the
formation of stimulus-response bonds, or habits, which become
strengthened whenever a particular response is reinforced in the
presence of a particular stimulus or in a given environment.
According to cognitivist views, however, neither responses nor
reinforcements are essential for learning; learning can result from
observation alone, the product being information or knowledge about
the world.  Each of these two schools has attempted to account for all
of learning on the basis of its own set of principles, but neither one
was ever completely successful.  We believe now that this was for good
reason; neurobehavioral research in monkeys has led to the
identification of two very different cerebral memory systems, each one
organized in a way to promote a particular form of learning, one
cognitive, the other behavioral.  A cortico-limbic system, interacting
with the basal forebrain cholinergic nuclei, has been found to be
critical for the storage of stimulus traces and their associations,
which appear to underlie the cognitivist processes of recognition and
recall.  A cortico-striatal system, by contrast, interacting with the
midbrain dopaminergic nuclei, has been shown to be critical for the
storage of certain stimulus-response links, and so seems to mediate
the behaviorist processes of habit formation and rule learning.  In
short, the cortico-limbic system provides the organism with a rich and
flexible store of information about its environment, whereas the
cortico-striatal system supplies it with adaptive and reliable habits
needed for negotiating its environment.  

The neurobehavioral evidence in monkeys supporting this dichotomy will
be elaborated.  The focus of the presentation will be on the
anatomical organization of these two parallel memory systems, their
differing neuropharmacological and electophysiological properties, and
the distinctive ways in which the two system operate to produce their
unique products of learning.

http://cns-web.bu.edu/
