ICLM Journal Club
This Week
Alessandra Perugini
Title: 'Patients with Parkinson’s disease show impaired use of priors in conditions of sensory uncertainty'
Abstract: Successful interaction with the environment requires an ability to evaluate sensory stimuli and choose a course of action. Sometimes sensory information is unreliable and other information is needed. An effective strategy is to evaluate the physical properties of a stimulus and if uncertainty remains, combine that information with what was experienced previously in similar situations. The neuronal circuits that underlie our ability to link past experience to ongoing decisions are unknown. We explore here whether patients with Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disease known to involve the basal ganglia, are impaired in perceptual decision-making when sensory information is uncertain and prior information is required to guide decisions. We designed a perceptual decision-making task and manipulated the statistics of the sensory stimuli to determine the influence of past experience on decision-making in the presence of sensory uncertainty. By using a combination of psychophysics and computational modeling, we show that patients with Parkinson’s disease are impaired at combining information from past experience with current sensory information to guide perceptual decision-making compared to healthy people. We also show that the failure to combine prior information with sensory information is independent of feedback learning. We suggest a role of the Basal Ganglia in the integration of past information with ongoing sensory information to guide decision-making.
About Us
Introduction
The Integrative Center for Learning and Memory (ICLM) is a multidisciplinary center of UCLA labs devoted to understanding the neural basis of learning and memory and its disorders. This will require a unified approach across different levels of analysis, including;
1. Elucidating the molecular cellular and systems mechanisms that allow neurons and synapses to undergo the long-term changes that ultimately correspond to 'neural memories'.
2. Understanding how functional dynamics and computations emerge from complex circuits of neurons, and how plasticity governs these processes.
3. Describing the neural systems in which different forms of learning and memory take place, and how these systems interact to ultimately generate behavior and cognition.
History of ICLM
The Integrative Center for Learning and Memory formally LMP started in its current form in 1998, and has served as a platform for many interactions and collaborations within UCLA. A key event organized by the group is the weekly ICLM Journal Club. For more than 10 years, graduate students, postdocs, principal investigators, and invited speakers have presented on topics ranging from the molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, through computational models of learning, to behavior and cognition. Dean Buonomano oversees the ICLM journal club with help of student/post doctoral organizers. For other events organized by ICLM go to http://www.iclm.ucla.edu/Events.html.
Current Organizers:
Walt Babiec (O'Dell Lab) & Helen Motanis (Buonomano Lab)
Current Faculty Advisor:
Past Organizers:
i) Anna Matynia(Aug 2004 - Jun 2008) (Silva Lab)
ii) Robert Brown (Aug 2008 - Jun 2009) (Balleine Lab)
iii) Balaji Jayaprakash (Aug 2008 - Nov 2011) (Silva Lab)
iv) Justin Shobe & Thomas Rogerson (Dec 2011 - June 2013) (Silva Lab)
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