Stimulus-response Sequences Research Articles

Learning a covert sequence of effector movements: limits to its acquisition

Sequence learning in serial reaction time (SRT) tasks is an established, lab-based experimental paradigm to study acquisition and transfer of skills based on the detection of predictable regularities in stimulus and motor response sequences. Participants learn a sequence of targets and responses to these targets by associating the responses with subsequently presented targets. In the traditional paradigm, however, actions and response targets are directly related. In contrast, the present study asked whether participants would demonstrate acquisition of a sequence of effector movements of the left vs. right hand (e.g., hand sequence learning), whilst the actual targets and associated finger responses are unpredictable. Twenty-seven young adults performed a SRT task to visually presented characters with the index or middle fingers of both hands. While the specific fingers to respond with were randomly selected for each target presentation, both hands followed a covert sequence. We asked whether participants would learn the underlying hand sequence as demonstrated by shortened response latencies and increased accuracy compared to a fully randomized hand sequence. The results show sequence-specific learning effects. However, categorization of hand responses depending on the previous response suggested that learning occurred predominantly for subsequent finger responses of the same hand, which added to general hand-based priming. Nevertheless, a marginally significant effect was observed even for predictable shifts between hands when homologous fingers were involved. Our results thus suggest that humans are able to benefit from predictable within-hand finger shifts but less so for predicted shifts between hands.

Keeping in step with the young: Chronometric and kinematic data show intact procedural locomotor sequence learning in older adults.

Sequence learning in serial reaction time tasks (SRTT) is an established, lab-based experimental paradigm to study acquisition and transfer of skill based on the detection of predictable stimulus and motor response sequences. Sequence learning has been mainly studied in key presses using visual target stimuli and is demonstrated by better performance in predictable sequences than in random sequences. In this study, we investigated sequence learning in the context of more complex locomotor responses. To this end, we developed a novel goal-directed stepping SRTT with auditory target stimuli in order to subsequently assess the effect of aging on sequence learning in this task, expecting that age-related performance reductions in postural control might disturb the acquisition of the sequence. We used pressure-sensitive floor mats to characterise performance across ten blocks of trials. In Experiment 1, 22 young adults demonstrated successful acquisition of the sequence in terms of the time to step on the target mat and percent error and thus validated our new paradigm. In Experiment 2, in order to contrast performance improvements in the stepping SRTT between 27 young and 22 old adults, motion capture of the feet was combined with the floor mat system to delineate individual movement phases during stepping onto a target mat. The latencies of several postural events as well as other movement parameters of a step were assessed. We observed significant learning effects in the latency of step initiation, the time to step on the target mat, and motion parameters such as stepping amplitude and peak stepping velocity, as well as in percent error. The data showed general age-related slowing but no significant performance differences in procedural locomotor sequence learning between young and old adults. The older adults also had comparable conscious representations of the sequence of stimuli as the young adults. We conclude that sequence learning occurred in this locomotor learning task that is much more complex than typical finger-tapping sequence learning tasks, and that healthy older adults showed similar learning effects compared to young adults, suggesting intact locomotor sequence learning capabilities despite general slowing and normal age-related decline in sensorimotor function.

The response-locked P3 component as indicator of pathophysiology in parkinson's disease

Event Abstract Back to Event The response-locked P3 component as indicator of pathophysiology in parkinson's disease Rolf Verleger1* 1 University of Lübeck, Germany For long, the P3b component of the event-related EEG potential has been considered an indicator of response-independent processes. Correspondingly, studies on the P3 component in Parkinson's disease have looked at stimulus-locked averages only. Differences between patients and healthy persons remained diffuse. However, P3b actually forms a bridge between stimulus and response in healthy persons (Gerson et al., 2005; Verleger et al., 2005) with latencies and amplitudes of P3 peaks varying across trials in such a way that P3 waves are equally large in stimulus-locked and response-locked averages. Research on basal ganglia has suggested that making stimulus-response sequences precede automatically is a most relevant function of these structures. Therefore, when studying disorders of basal ganglia, as Parkinson's disease, it might make sense to focus on P3's function as a bridge between stimuli and responses. Thus, we compared stimulus- and response-locked P3b between patients with Parkinson's disease and healthy control groups in a choice-response task. In patients, P3 was distinctly smaller in response-locked than in stimulus-locked averages whereas, again, both amplitudes were equal in healthy participants. The difference in patients was due to a fronto-central negative shift, overlapping P3 during the final 100 ms before the response. Presumably, in order to compensate for the deficient automatic process, patients have to use additional activation of their supplementary motor areas. This difference is diluted when averaging is stimulus-locked. The specific reduction of response-locked P3 might qualify as a marker of basal-ganglia dysfunction. Keywords: Attention, Parkinson Conference: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster Sessions: Neurophysiology of Cognition and Attention Citation: Verleger R (2011). The response-locked P3 component as indicator of pathophysiology in parkinson's disease. Conference Abstract: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI). doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00321 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 22 Nov 2011; Published Online: 28 Nov 2011. * Correspondence: Dr. Rolf Verleger, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany, 665948@frontiersin.org Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Rolf Verleger Google Rolf Verleger Google Scholar Rolf Verleger PubMed Rolf Verleger Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

The Correlation between Sleep and Creativity

AbstractFredrich August von Kekule, a famous German chemist, was attempting to determine the shape of the benzene molecule, which was known to have six carbon atoms. In 1865, reflecting upon his discovery of the hexagonal-ring like structure, he asserted that the solution came to him in a dream1; however, it is not clear if he was in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreaming or if he was in non-REM (NREM) sleep imagery. It is possible to think of this type of discoveries as an expression of creativity, i.e. the ability to use existing pieces of information and combine them in novel patterns leading to greater understanding and new solutions. Preliminary support of the role of sleep in creative thinking comes from a recent study by Wagner et al.2; these authors asked normal participants to perform a cognitive task, the Number Reduction Task. In this task, participants are required to understand a set of stimulus-response sequences and supply a single representative numerical answer. Improvement in task performance may be gradual (i.e., by slowly increasing response speed), or abrupt (after insight into an abstract rule underlying all sequences). They found that 59% of the participants that were allowed to sleep were able to perform the task in a time that was 70% shorter than the other group that did not sleep and suggested that sleep may facilitate insight-related problem solving. Here we report the results of the first study showing a direct complex correlation between sleep architecture or microstructure and creativity in normal controls.

Executive and Motivational Control of Behavior and the Primate Prefrontal Cortex

Event Abstract Back to Event Executive and Motivational Control of Behavior and the Primate Prefrontal Cortex Masataka Watanabe1* 1 Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience Musashida, Japan The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is essential for higher cognitive activity, such as reasoning, problem solving, planning and behavioral inhibition. Humans and animals work to attain several goals for promoting their better survival. The higher cognitive function of the PFC appears to be important for this process. In order to achieve a goal, organisms must appropriately comprehend the environmental situation. To do so, it is more important to code the meaning that the currently presented stimulus has to the organism than simply to code its physical characteristics such as its length, magnitude and frequency. Indeed, there are primate PFC neurons that are concerned with coding the meaning (behavioral significance) of the stimulus in relation to what behavioral response it indicates to the organism in the current task situation. In order to code the meaning of the stimulus, it is essential to continuously monitor the cognitive context that consists of the task situation and/or previous stimulus-response sequences. Thus, there are primate PFC neurons that are involved in monitoring the cognitive context by showing context-related sustained baseline activity. Importantly, PFC is concerned with not only cognitive but also motivational context. The motivational context consists of the organism’s present motivational state and information regarding the attractiveness/aversiveness of the past, present, or future reward/threat. There are primate PFC neurons that are concerned with coding the motivation significance of the stimulus in relation to what appetitive or aversive event the stimulus is associated with. Some PFC neurons represent, not what is actually presented, but instead what is missing in the current motivational context. There are also PFC neurons that are involved in monitoring the motivational context by showing context-related sustained baseline activity. For the organism to better survive, it is crucial to behave not in a stimulus-triggered habitual or automatic way, but in a manner that is dependent on both the cognitive and motivational context, especially when cost (cognitive) and benefit (motivational) require compromise. While all areas of the PFC are concerned with context processing, the orbitofrontal cortex is primarily concerned with processing motivational context information, especially in relation to future reward/threat, and the medial PFC including the anterior cingulate area appears to be involved in processing more cognitive than motivational context information in relation to outcome-based action selection. The lateral PFC is concerned with both motivational and cognitive context information, and more importantly appears to be concerned with the integration of motivational and cognitive context information for adaptive goal-directed behavior.

Exposure with response prevention versus habit reversal in Tourettes’s syndrome: a controlled study

The intentional nature of tics provides the opportunity to apply behavioural interventions aimed at tic reduction through interruption of stimulus-response sequences. The aim of this study has been to evaluate the effect of exposure and response prevention (ER) versus habit reversal (HR) in 43 Tourette’s syndrome (TS) patients. The three outcome measures were: the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS), 15-min tic frequency registrations monitored at the institute and 15-min home tic frequency registrations. Both treatment conditions resulted in statistically significant improvements on all outcome measures ( p<0.0001). No significant differences were found between the treatment conditions on any of the outcome measures, although there was a tendency in favour of ER on the YGTSS ( p=0.05). These results suggest that, at least in the short term, TS tic symptoms can be treated effectively with both types of treatment.

Hot Affects, Cold Theory

Hot Affects, Cold Theory Anna-LLze Berry My Wife and Family received me with great Surprize and Joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I muit freely confess, the Sight of them filled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt; and the more, by reflecting on the near Alliance I had to them.... And when I began to consider, that by copulating with one of the Yahoo-Species, I had become a Parent of more, it Struck me with the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror. Jonathan Swift Viscerality is the perception of suspense. The ¿pace into which it jolts the flesh is one of an inability to art or reflect, a Spasmodic passivity, so taut a receptivity that the body is paralyzed until it is jolted back into artion-reartion by recognition. Call it the ¿pace ofpassion. Its elementary units are neither the absolute perspectives of movement-vision nor the vertoral fields of proprioception proper, but rather degrees of intensity. The Space of passion constitutes a quasi-qualitative realm adjacent to the quasi corporeal.... Passion, then, is beSt understood less as an abstract Space than as the time-Stuff of Spatial abstraction. Call the coupling of a unit of quasi corporeality with a unit of passion an affedt: an ability to affect and a susceptibility to be affected. An emotion orfeeling is a recognized affect, an identified intensity as reinjected into Stimulus-reSponse paths, into artion-reartion circuits of infolding and externalization —in short, into subjert-objeCt relations. Emotion is a contamination of empirical Space by affect, which belongs to the body without an image. Brian Massumi I begin w it h quotations that, while far apart and ostensibly uncon­ nected, map out certain territories covered by Martha C. Nussbaum and Robert Rawdon Wilson, hinting at the range—the sometimes dazzling array—of approaches offered in their two quite distinct books dealing with deeply felt emotions as revealed in various degrees of intensity, passion, viscerality.1 The quoted passages, whether from sites of political satire l In this review, I shall be primarily concerned with Nussbaum’s and Wilson’s books. Each writer raises a large number of issues on many levels. I can com­ ment on only a few of these. Elsewhere, I should want to consider the manner ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 219-234 Anna-Lize Berry works in the areas of Shakespeare and Jacobean Drama, eighteenth-century drama and prose, the nineteenth-century novel, women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the history of the novel. or cultural theory, mark strong emotions with suggestively spatial quali­ ties. While the Swiftian discourse constructs a visceral disgust or horror at human society, thus distancing Gulliver (stabled—yet unstable—with the horses) outside the familial domain, Massumi’s recent exploration of the affect’s spatial architecture describes passion contaminating empiri­ cal space; each surveys subterranean seams, charting much that goes on beneath the surface terrain. So with Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought and Wilson’s The Hydra’s Tale which develop theoretical models for the emotions, the rhizoid complexities underneath apparently uncomplicated surfaces that become ever more manifest. Nothing is more illusory than simplicity.* 2Both cultural practices and doctrines, whether religious or political, impose the proposition that many experiences, all the most important ones perhaps, happen sud­ denly without mediation. In much the same way, knowing the truth of an event (being able to say, “This, and only this, has happened”) is often taken to be intuitive. Things and actions just are. The world’s myriad assaults fall upon passive and conditioned human subjects. Although many rea­ sons have been given to account for human passivity in experience, the contemporary model generally holds that either culture or ideology, or both, has made us such. Much contemporary thinking on the problems of moral action and thought, even accounts of immediate stimulus-response sequences, holds that the human actions are strictly determined by the cultural machine that incorporates them. This machine may be of two kinds, and in some analyses it can be seen as being both at once: either one is embedded within a distinct system of cultural practices that initi­ ates and regulates...

Coding and Monitoring of Motivational Context in the Primate Prefrontal Cortex

The prefrontal cortex is involved in acquiring and maintaining information about context, including the set of task instructions and/or the outcome of previous stimulus-response sequences. Most studies on context-dependent processing in the prefrontal cortex have been concerned with such executive functions, but the prefrontal cortex is also involved in motivational operations. We thus wished to determine whether primate prefrontal neurons show evidence of representing the motivational context learned by the monkey. We trained monkeys in a delayed reaction task in which an instruction cue indicated the presence or absence of reward. In random alternation with no reward, the same one of several different kinds of food and liquid rewards was delivered repeatedly in a block of approximately 50 trials, so that reward information would define the motivational context. In response to an instruction cue indicating absence of reward, we found that neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex not only predicted the absence of reward but also represented more specifically which kind of reward would be omitted in a given trial. These neurons seem to code contextual information concerning which kind of reward may be delivered in following trials. We also found prefrontal neurons that showed tonic baseline activity that may be related to monitoring such motivational context. The different types of neurons were distributed differently along the dorsoventral extent of the lateral prefrontal cortex. Such operations in the prefrontal cortex may be important for the monkey to maximize reward or to modify behavioral strategies and thus may contribute to executive control.

Control over location-based response activation in the Simon task: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

In 4 Simon experiments the authors examined control over 2 routes of sensorimotor processing: response priming in the unconditional route and response selection via the conditional route. The Simon effect diminished as the frequency of noncorresponding trials increased. Location-based response priming was observed only when the stimulus followed a corresponding event but not after a noncorresponding trial. Therefore, the unconditional route appears to be suppressed whenever the task context indicates priming as potentially disadvantageous. Moreover, the task-irrelevant stimulus location was used for response selection as a function of correspondence probability. Although exact repetitions of stimulus-response sequences caused a marked speed-up of responses, this 3rd mechanism is independent of unconditional route suppression and frequency-based adjustments in the conditional route.

Stimulus dimension shifts in patients with schizophrenia, with and without paranoid hallucinatory symptoms, or obsessive compulsive disorder: strategies, blocking and monoamine status

Reversal, and intra-dimensional (ID) and extra-dimensional (ED) nonreversal discrimination shifts were studied to see if learned inattention to the irrelevant dimension differentially influenced the efficacy of learning and stimulus choice strategy. Performance was compared with conditioned blocking (CB) and monoamine metabolic status between healthy controls, patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or schizophrenia with (PH) or without (NP) active paranoid hallucinatory symptoms. PH and NP patients improved learning with practice, but showed an impaired shift on each task. OCD patients were impaired only on the ED-shift. The NP patients' impairment was nonspecific and, unlike PH and controls, it related to reversal performance. All subjects acquired an attentional set for colour reflected in the length of stimulus-response sequences. Analysis of paired-stimulus choice-strategies showed that while all patients showed fewer correct win-stay choices, only PH patients perseverated with lose-stay choices. Learning about the added stimulus in the CB task related to ID-shift efficiency in NP patients. Increases of dopamine activity related to delayed learning but more switches of stimulus choice in the shift-tasks. Increases of serotonin activity correlated with faster learning in controls, OCD and PH patients. In NP patients the opposite held for dopamine and serotonin activity. Thus the two learned inattention tasks have different if related requirements and correlates: the data are consistent with the use of automatic exogenous attention strategies by NP patients, of inefficient controlled attention by PH patients and the automatization of endogenous processes in controls.

Personality as a fundamental concept in scientific psychology

Abstract It is argued that the concepts of individual differences and personality are an indispensable part of any scientific psychology, by virtue of the fact that stimulus-response sequences are inevitably mediated by an organism the structure of which, partly determined genetically and partly by its reinforcement history, critically affects the sequence. Theories in this field, to be useful, must be linked with the theories and findings of experimental psychology, and reflect advances in conceptualization and thinking there. Personality theories are both descriptive and causal, and it is argued that without the causal element descriptive patterns, usually arrived at by correlational and factor analytic methods, possess an element of subjectivity which is so strong as to make any definitive statements impossible. It is further argued that such a paradigm, embracing both descriptive and causal factors, is already in existence, and is capable of integrating well with many different areas of experimental p...

Antecedents of fluent and dysfluent oral reading: A descriptive analysis

Utilizing the method of repeated observations of a single subject, 18 oral reading samples were obtained from a fluent male child. Observations were made when the child was 5.6 to 6.1 yr of age. The reading material contained varying amounts of words neither understood nor produced by the child. Taped samples were analyzed for antecedents and consequences of fluent and dysfluent events, and extraneous verbal and nonverbal stimulus-response sequences. The analysis revealed the presence of five antecedents of dysfluencies: (1) poor lexical control, (2) competing stimulus-response sequences, (3) intraverbal break, (4) poor prosodic control, and (5) unusually strong intraverbal control. The results also suggested that fluency may be a function of appropriate, sequential, discriminative, stimulus control, adequate intraverbal and prosodic control in the absence of overbearing intraverbal control and interfering stimulus-response sequences.

Reinforcer and response specificity in appetitive transfer of control

Three experiments examine transfer from appetitive Pavlovian conditioning to appetitive instrumental responding by varying the similarity between conditions of Pavlovian reinforcement and instrumental reward. After conditioning with rats confined in a restraining device, a CS for electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) produced substantial facilitation of operant responding for ESB, while a CS for food facilitated operant responding for food. However, no effects on rate of responding for food were seen during a CS for ESB. In a fourth experiment, four groups of rats were trained to barpress for rewarding electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) and then given discriminative Pavlovian conditioning with ESB. The groups differed in the degree of similarity between the stimulus-response sequences present during Pavlovian conditioning and those occurring in instrumental responding. As similarity increased, so did the degree of conditioned facilitation in subsequent transfer tests. These results indicate that conditioned incentive responses or reinforcer-derived expectancies are specific to the conditions under which they develop, rather than generalized emotional or motivational responses.

Formulations Regarding an Experimental Analysis of Covert Impulse and Depression Responses as Mediators of Consummatory S—R Sequences

The present paper analyzes the possible role of covert impulse and emotional responses in mediating consummatory stimulus-response sequences. The hypothesis forwarded is that this mediational role can develop under certain conditions in which consummatory stimulus-response sequences are blocked by inhibiting setting factors.

Stimulus specific habituation in a protozoan

The protozoan, Stentor coeruleus, can contract in an all-or-none fashion in response to mechanical and photic stimuli. Upon repeated presentation of either of these stimuli a decrement in the probability of eliciting a contraction is observed. However repeated mechanical stimulation does not affect the animals' sensitivity to photic stimuli and conversely. This stimulus specificity suggests that habituation occurs in processes which are not common to the photic and mechanical stimulus-response sequences. Action potentials are shown to be produced by both stimuli. However the receptor potentials generated by photic and mechanical stimuli differ in form and in sensitivity to polarizing currents. It is concluded that the receptor potential and transduction mechanisms are not common to both forms of stimulation and therefore one or both of these mechanisms may be changing during the course of habituation.