Skip Navigation



Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on November 4, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp228
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ruge, H.
Right arrow Articles by Wolfensteller, U.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Ruge, H.
Right arrow Articles by Wolfensteller, U.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Rapid Formation of Pragmatic Rule Representations in the Human Brain during Instruction-Based Learning

Hannes Ruge1,2 and Uta Wolfensteller1,3

1 Neuroimaging Center, Department of Psychology, 2 Institute of General Psychology, Biopsychology, and Methods of Psychology, Department of Psychology, 3 Section of Systems Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical Faculty Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden 01069, Germany

Address correspondence to Hannes Ruge, Fachrichtung Psychologie, Fakultät Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany. Email: ruge{at}psychologie.tu-dresden.de.

The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated the instruction-based learning of novel arbitrary stimulus–response mappings in order to understand the brain mechanisms that enable successful behavioral rule implementation in the absence of trial-and-error learning. We developed a novel task design that allowed the examination of rapidly evolving brain activation dynamics starting from an explicit instruction phase and further across a short behavioral practice phase. As a first key result, the study revealed that different sets of brain regions displayed either decreasing or increasing activation profiles already across the first few practice trials, suggesting an impressively rapid redistribution of labor throughout the brain. Furthermore, behavioral performance improvement across practice was tightly coupled with brain activation during the practice phase (caudate nucleus), the instruction phase (lateral midprefrontal cortex), or both (lateral premotor cortex bordering prefrontal cortex). Together, the present results provide first important insights into the brain systems involved in the rapid transfer of control from initially abstract rule representations induced by explicit instructions toward pragmatic representations enabling the fluent behavioral implementation.

Key Words: functional magnetic resonance imaging • prefrontal cortex • premotor cortex • stimulus–response rule • striatum

Hannes Ruge and Uta Wolfensteller have contributed equally to this work.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.