Abstract
Previous cognitive behavioral studies based on Acquired Equivalence Associative learning Task (AEALT) showed a strong relation between hippocampus and basal ganglia in associative learning. However, experimental behavioral studies of patients with Generalized Tonic Clonic (GTC) epilepsy remained sparse. The aim of the present study is to integrate a classical behavioral cognitive analysis with a computational model approach to investigate cognitive associative learning impairments in patients with GTC epilepsy. We measured the accuracy of associative learning response performance in five GTC epileptic patients and five control subjects by using AEALT, all subjects were matched in age and gender. We ran the task using E-Prime, a neuropsychological software program, and SPSS for data statistical analysis. We tested whether GTC epileptic patients would have different learning performance than normal subjects, based on the degree and the location of impairment either in basal ganglia and/or hippocampus. With the number of patients that was available, our behavioral analysis showed no remarkable differences in learning performance of GTC patients as compared to their control subjects, both in the transfer and acquisition phases. In parallel, our simulation results confirmed strong connection and interaction between hippocampus and basal ganglia in our GTC and their control subjects. Nevertheless, the differences in neural firing rate of the connectionist model and weight update of basal ganglia were not significantly different between GTC and control subjects. Therefore, the behavioral analysis and the simulation data provided the same result, thus indicating that the computational model is likely to predict cognitive outcomes.
Highlights
In the transfer phase the difference was not strong either (p = 0.97, two-tailed test). These results indicated that Acquired Equivalence Associative learning Task (AEALT) did not reveal cognitive impairment in Generalized Tonic Clonic (GTC) epileptic patients, neither in hippocampus (associated with the transfer (Tamminga et al, 1992; Buchanan et al, 1993; Bunsey and Eichenbaum, 1995; Henke et al, 1997; Heckers et al, 1999; Myers et al, 2003; Polgár et al, 2010; Moustafa and Gluck, 2011), nor in basal ganglia
We considered two different conditions based on the strength of hippocampus while fixing the values of basal ganglia input to have range of values in each condition between 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, and 1
In the second condition, when hippocampus strength was above zero, taking ranges of 1, 2, 3, and 4, the average of the neural firing rate in GTC and controls was above 50% and the weight update evaluation of basal ganglia was in line with this range of the neural firing rate
Summary
Acquired Equivalence Associative learning Task (AEALT) is a psychological cognitive task for associative learning assessment (Moustafa et al, 2000; Myers et al, 2003; Herzallah et al, 2010; Moustafa and Gluck, 2011). In the present study; we applied AEALT (Moustafa et al, 2000; Myers et al, 2003; Herzallah et al, 2010; Moustafa and Gluck, 2011), to investigate cognitive impairments in GTC epileptic patients using combined experimental behavioral and computational approaches. Our main purpose does not purely focusing on presenting a separate computational-theoretical study neither a segregated clinical case report independently but rather to validate the simulation approach by comparing our simulated results with the experimental behavioral results as measured in GTC-epileptic patients and controls. Our attention was to test how our computational model (if correctly fed with experimental data from representative patients) could mimic the results of cognitive behavioral test
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