Knowlton et al. (1996)

A Neostriatal Habit Learning System in Humans

Science, 273(5280), 1399-1402

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Abstract

Amnesic patients and nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease were given a probabilistic classification task in which they learned which of two outcomes would occur on each trial, given the particular combination of cues that appeared. Amnesic patients exhibited normal learning of the task but had severely impaired declarative memory for the training episode. In contrast, patients with Parkinson's disease failed to learn the probabilistic classification task, despite having intact memory for the training episode. This double dissociation shows that the limbic-diencephalic regions damaged in amnesia and the neostriatum damaged in Parkinson's disease support separate and parallel learning systems. In humans, the neostriatum (caudate nucleus and putamen) is essential for the gradual, incremental learning of associations that is characteristic of habit learning. The neostriatum is important not just for motor behavior and motor learning but also for acquiring nonmotor dispositions and tendencies that depend on new associations.

Reference

Knowlton, B. J., Mangels, J. A., & Squire, L. R. (1996). A neostriatal habit learning system in humans. Science, 273(5280), 1399-1402.

What Rests on This

1 mechanism cites this source. Each finding below is quoted as it appears on that mechanism's own page.

Procedural Memory Memory Systems

Neural substrate

In a double dissociation, patients with Parkinson's disease failed to learn a probabilistic classification (weather prediction) task yet remembered the training episode, while amnesic patients learned the task normally but forgot the episode, implicating the neostriatum (caudate and putamen) in gradual habit learning