Learning and memory in the human brain

Abstract: The first chapter of the thesis 'Learning and Memory in the Human Brain' provides a brief review of the brain as well as cognition from the point of view of information processing in physical systems. We include a brief outline of information processing as conceived of within the classical framework of cognitive science. We show how this perspective can be understood in terms of information processing in a certain class of dynamical systems and we indicate how this view of cognition can be generalized to a general dynamical systems framework. In the second chapter, we integrate this dynamical view of cognition with learning and development. In chapter 3 we describe the methodological background for the experimental studies. In chapter 4, we review the cognitive neuroscience of human memory systems and chapter 5 provides a review of some experimental work on literate and illiterate subjects. The first experimental study discussed in chapter 6 outlines several approaches to the study of learning related effects in the human brain with hemodynamically based functional neuroimaging methods. Two of these approaches are applied in the second and third study, where we take the view that learning can be viewed as processes by which the brain functionally restructures its processing pathways or its representations of information. These investigations of learning related modulation of functional retrieval networks were further explored in two different experimental paradigms in the fourth study. This allowed us to investigate the effects material and performance. In the fifth study, a group of healthy older illiterate women was investigated on an auditory word-pair association cued-recall paradigm. In study 6, literate and illiterate participants were compared on immediate verbal repetition of words and pseudowords. In the follow-up study 7, we applied a network approach to study the interactive processing characteristics of the underlying language network in literate and illiterate subjects. Finally, in the 8th experimental study, the activation levels of the right and left inferior parietal regions were investigated in two independent groups of illiterate subjects and their matched literate controls.