Carol A. Seger

“Exploring the Many Contributions of the Basal Ganglia to Human Learning and Cognition with fMRI”

The basal ganglia interact with and modulate all regions of cerebral cortex, and affect almost all aspects of human mental life.  Our research uses the domains of categorization and rule learning to explore these affects.  We have identified different contributions of four independent corticostriatal loops in these tasks:  the motivational loop through ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex is important for processing reward and feedback; the executive loop through the head of the caudate and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex contributes to feedback evaluation; the visual loop through the body and tail of the caudate and inferior temporal cortex contributes to learning the mappings from  the visual stimuli to the appropriate categorical responses, and the motor loop through the putamen and motor cortex contributes to response selection in skilled performance.
 
 
 Please contact David Peterson (dp@ucsd.edu) if you would like to meet with the speaker before or after the seminar.