Agents of the mind

Houk, James C.

doi:10.1007/s00422-005-0569-8

Cited by 130 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…selection and/or initiation) of cortical patterns of activation for both planned behaviors and for thoughts (Houk, 2005). In contrast, he proposed that the cerebellum engages in online amplification and refinement of behaviors or thoughts as they are occurring, which provides an error correction mechanism for performance of the task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A coherent limb movement can be broken down into smaller component sub-movements, which include online error corrections (Barto et al, 1999;Fishbach et al, 2006;Ghez & Martin, 1982). Houk (2005) also proposed that the cerebellar role in refinement and amplification and the striatal role of embodiment could be involved in language processing. The current study is the first to look at effective connectivity of the cerebellum and basal ganglia during a language processing task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of the basal ganglia and cerebellum in language processing

et al. 2007

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The roles of the cerebellum and basal ganglia have typically been confined in the literature to motor planning and control. However, mounting evidence suggests that these structures are involved in more cognitive domains such as language processing. In the current study, we looked at effective connectivity (the influence that one brain region has on another) of the cerebellum and basal ganglia with regions thought to be involved in phonological processing, i.e. left inferior frontal gyrus and left lateral temporal cortex. We analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging data (fMRI) obtained during a rhyming judgment task in adults using dynamic causal modeling (DCM). The results showed that the cerebellum has reciprocal connections with both left inferior frontal gyrus and left lateral temporal cortex, whereas the putamen has unidirectional connections into these two brain regions. Furthermore, the connections between cerebellum and these phonological processing areas were stronger than the connections between putamen and these areas. This pattern of results suggests that the putamen and cerebellum may have distinct roles in language processing. Based on research in the motor planning and control literature, we argue that the putamen engages in cortical initiation while the cerebellum amplifies and refines this signal to facilitate correct decision making.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of the basal ganglia and cerebellum in language processing

et al. 2007

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“…In contrast, the lower level system comprising the motor cortex (M1), the spinal cord (SC) and intermediate systems represents posture-dependent muscle force signals needed to execute the actions [16,17,20]. Thus, with reference to sequential actions, the overall system implements a convenient division of labor, where motor sequences such as writing letters or words, drawing shapes, playing key sequences, etc., are learned as action programs at an abstract, posture-and effector-independent kinematic level in the PFC/PM/SMA system, and are then "translated" into sequences of motor commands by M1 [3], possibly guided by the basal ganglia and cerebellum [23,30,31]. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that sequence recognition and learning may also occur in M1 [5,14,19], and the model we study here could well apply to population-coded representations in M1 as well.…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some neurons in the prefrontal cortex fire preferentially at the beginning of action sequences [36], while others remain active for the duration of the sequence [37]. These signals go to both the SMA/PM region, and to the basal ganglia and cerebellum, where they are hypothesized to select [23,36,31] and pace [29,31] action sequences, respectively. Neurons with sequence-specific activity, i.e., sequence identifiers, have been shown in pre-SMA, while neurons encoding element order in action sequences have been found in both PFC and SMA [3,38,9,7,10,36].…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning Complex Population-Coded Sequences

Byadarhaly

Perdoor

Vasa

et al. 2009

Artificial Neural Networks – ICANN 2009

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Abstract. The sequential structure of complex actions is apparently learned at an abstract "cognitive" level in several regions of the frontal cortex, independent of the control of the immediate effectors by the motor system. At this level, actions are represented in terms of kinematic parameters -especially direction of end effector movement -and encoded using population codes. Muscle force signals are generated from this representation by downstream systems in the motor cortex and the spinal cord. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning population-coded kinematic sequences in an abstract neural network model of the medial frontal cortex. For concreteness, the sequences are represented as line drawings in a two-dimensional workspace. Learning such sequences presents several challenges because of the internal complexity of the individual sequences and extensive overlap between sequences. We show that, by using a simple module-selection mechanism, our model is capable of learning multiple sequences with complex structure and very high cross-sequence similarity.

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Functional connectivity of the striatum in experts of stenography

2015

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IntroductionStenography, or shorthand, is a unique set of skills that involves intensive training which is nearly life-long and orchestrating various brain functional modules, including auditory, linguistic, cognitive, mnemonic, and motor. Stenography provides cognitive neuroscientists with a unique opportunity to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the neural plasticity that enables such a high degree of expertise. However, shorthand is quickly being replaced with voice recognition technology. We took this nearly final opportunity to scan the brains of the last alive shorthand experts of the Japanese language.MethodsThirteen right-handed stenographers and fourteen right-handed controls participated in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study.ResultsThe fMRI data revealed plastic reorganization of the neural circuits around the putamen. The acquisition of expert skills was accompanied by structural and functional changes in the area. The posterior putamen is known as the execution center of acquired sensorimotor skills. Compared to nonexperts, the posterior putamen in stenographers had high covariation with the cerebellum and midbrain.The stenographers' brain developed different neural circuits from those of the nonexpert brain.ConclusionsThe current data illustrate the vigorous plasticity in the putamen and in its connectivity to other relevant areas in the expert brain. This is a case of vigorous neural plastic reorganization in response to massive overtraining, which is rare especially considering that it occurred in adulthood.

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Agents of the mind

Cited by 130 publications

References 66 publications

The role of the basal ganglia and cerebellum in language processing

The role of the basal ganglia and cerebellum in language processing

Learning Complex Population-Coded Sequences

Functional connectivity of the striatum in experts of stenography

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