Corticostriatal contributions to musical expectancy perception.

This study investigates the functional neuroanatomy of harmonic music perception with fMRI. We presented short pieces of Western classical music to nonmusicians. The ending of each piece was systematically manipulated in the following four ways: Standard Cadence (expected resolution), Deceptive Cadence (moderate deviation from expectation), Modulated Cadence (strong deviation from expectation but remaining within the harmonic structure of Western tonal music), and Atonal Cadence (strongest deviation from expectation by leaving the harmonic structure of Western tonal music).

Implicit and explicit categorization: a tale of four species.

Categorization is essential for survival, and it is a widely studied cognitive adaptation in humans and animals. An influential neuroscience perspective differentiates in humans an explicit, rule-based categorization system from an implicit system that slowly associates response outputs to different regions of perceptual space. This perspective is being extended to study categorization in other vertebrate species, using category tasks that have a one-dimensional, rule-based solution or a two-dimensional, information-integration solution.

A critical review of habit learning and the Basal Ganglia.

The current paper briefly outlines the historical development of the concept of habit learning and discusses its relationship to the basal ganglia. Habit learning has been studied in many different fields of neuroscience using different species, tasks, and methodologies, and as a result it has taken on a wide range of definitions from these various perspectives. We identify five common but not universal, definitional features of habit learning: that it is inflexible, slow or incremental, unconscious, automatic, and insensitive to reinforcer devaluation.

Pigeons' categorization may be exclusively nonanalytic.

Recent theoretical and empirical developments in human category learning have differentiated an analytic, rule-based system of category learning from a nonanalytic system that integrates information across stimulus dimensions. In the present study, the researchers applied this theoretical distinction to pigeons' category learning. Pigeons learned to categorize stimuli varying in the tilt and width of their internal striping.

Initial training with difficult items facilitates information integration, but not rule-based category learning.

Previous research has disagreed about whether a difficult cognitive skill is best learned by beginning with easy or difficult examples. Two experiments that clarify this debate are reported. Participants in both experiments received one of three types of training on a difficult perceptual categorization task.

Response processes in information-integration category learning.

Much recent evidence suggests that human category learning is mediated by multiple systems. Evidence suggests that at least one of these depends on procedural learning within the basal ganglia. Information-integration categorization tasks are thought to load heavily on this procedural-learning system.

A neurobiological theory of automaticity in perceptual categorization.

A biologically detailed computational model is described of how categorization judgments become automatic in tasks that depend on procedural learning. The model assumes 2 neural pathways from sensory association cortex to the premotor area that mediates response selection. A longer and slower path projects to the premotor area via the striatum, globus pallidus, and thalamus.

The neurobiology of category learning.

Many recent studies have examined the neural basis of category learning. Behavioral neuroscience results suggest that both the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia play important category-learning roles; neurons that develop category-specific firing properties are found in both regions, and lesions to both areas cause category-learning deficits. Similar studies indicate that the inferotemporal cortex does not mediate the learning of new categories.