Interdisciplinary Collaborative Consortium on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Category Learning

For the past 25 years, category learning tasks have held special interest for experimental cognitive psychologists. Category learning seems to tap both elemental associative learning processes and more complex higher-order cognitive skills. An example of category learning is how physicians accurately diagnose a disease from a list of symptoms. Recently, cognitive neuroscientists have begun probing the neural substrates of category learning by studying patient populations with specific performance impairments and with functional imaging studies of normal subjects. Not unexpectedly, considering the complex nature of category learning tasks, the findings reported from different laboratories are often inconsistent. For example, researchers using the results from studies with Parkinson’s patients propose that category learning is supported by a specialized memory system involving the basal ganglia, others believe the same data is more parsimoniously interpreted within the traditional single-memory system model.

The proposed consortium creates a diverse network of researchers whose shared expertise should improve the design of experiments and constrain the interpretation of results. Category learning, because it does represent a complex cognitive skill, well-characterized behaviorally and amenable to human lesion and imaging studies, provides an excellent framework for linking neurology, psychology, and behavioral science.