Balsam Peter D, Gallistel C Randy
Barnard College and Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Trends Neurosci. 2009 Feb;32(2):73-8. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2008.10.004. Epub 2009 Jan 10.
Neurobiological research on learning assumes that temporal contiguity is essential for association formation, but what constitutes temporal contiguity has never been specified. We review evidence that learning depends, instead, on learning a temporal map. Temporal relations between events are encoded even from single experiences. The speed with which an anticipatory response emerges is proportional to the informativeness of the encoded relation between a predictive stimulus or event and the event it predicts. This principle yields a quantitative account of the heretofore undefined, but theoretically crucial, concept of temporal pairing, an account in quantitative accord with surprising experimental findings. The same principle explains the basic results in the cue competition literature, which motivated the Rescorla-Wagner model and most other contemporary models of associative learning. The essential feature of a memory mechanism in this account is its ability to encode quantitative information.
关于学习的神经生物学研究假定时间接近性对于联想的形成至关重要，但从未明确规定什么构成时间接近性。我们回顾了相关证据，即学习反而依赖于学习时间图谱。事件之间的时间关系甚至从单一经历中就会被编码。预期反应出现的速度与预测性刺激或事件与它所预测的事件之间编码关系的信息量成正比。这一原则对迄今为止未定义但在理论上至关重要的时间配对概念给出了定量解释，该解释在数量上与惊人的实验结果相符。同样的原则解释了线索竞争文献中的基本结果，这些结果推动了雷斯克拉 - 瓦格纳模型以及大多数其他当代联想学习模型的发展。在这种解释中，记忆机制的基本特征是其编码定量信息的能力。
