Gallistel Charles R, Balsam Peter D
Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, United States.
Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, Barnard College and Columbia University, United States.
Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2014 Feb;108:136-44. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2013.11.019. Epub 2013 Dec 3.
Most studies in the neurobiology of learning assume that the underlying learning process is a pairing - dependent change in synaptic strength that requires repeated experience of events presented in close temporal contiguity. However, much learning is rapid and does not depend on temporal contiguity, which has never been precisely defined. These points are well illustrated by studies showing that the temporal relations between events are rapidly learned- even over long delays- and that this knowledge governs the form and timing of behavior. The speed with which anticipatory responses emerge in conditioning paradigms is determined by the information that cues provide about the timing of rewards. The challenge for understanding the neurobiology of learning is to understand the mechanisms in the nervous system that encode information from even a single experience, the nature of the memory mechanisms that can encode quantities such as time, and how the brain can flexibly perform computations based on this information.
大多数关于学习神经生物学的研究都假定，潜在的学习过程是突触强度的一种依赖配对的变化，这需要对在紧密时间连续性中呈现的事件进行反复体验。然而，许多学习过程是快速的，并不依赖于时间连续性，而时间连续性从未被精确界定过。这些观点在一些研究中得到了很好的体现，这些研究表明事件之间的时间关系能被快速学习——即使是在很长的延迟之后——并且这种知识支配着行为的形式和时机。在条件反射范式中，预期反应出现的速度取决于线索所提供的关于奖励时机的信息。理解学习神经生物学面临的挑战在于，要弄清楚神经系统中编码来自哪怕单一经历的信息的机制、能够编码诸如时间等数量信息的记忆机制的本质，以及大脑如何基于这些信息灵活地进行计算。
