Memory and learning: information processing in the hippocampus

Whether we crack difficult puzzles, memorize an environment or learn abstract terms: they are all cases of cognitive learning. Mental images of the world help us do this.

  • Humans, but also some animal species, learn not only gradually through trial and error. When solving problems, they come to sudden insights.
  • They can generalize these and transfer them to other problems.
  • So-called cognitive learning is based on internal information processing. Humans and some animals can map their environment mentally and then work with these inner ideas.
  • An example of mental representations are cognitive maps that one creates from one’s surroundings in the mind.
  • The neural correlate of these mental maps is, among other things, the activity of place cells in the hippocampus.
  • Memory plays an important role in cognitive learning. Previous knowledge and beliefs determine what you have learned.

hippocampus

The hippocampus is the largest part of the archicortex and an area in the temporal lobe. It is also an important part of the limbic system. Functionally, he is involved in memory processes, but also in spatial orientation. It comprises the subiculum, the dentate gyrus and the ammonshorn with its four fields CA1-CA4.

Changes in the structure of the hippocampus due to stress are associated with pain chronification. The hippocampus also plays an important role in increasing pain from fear.

memory

Memory is a generic term for all types of information storage in the organism. In addition to the mere retention, this also includes the recording of the information, its order and retrieval.

Sultan is extremely hungry. A banana would be there exactly the right thing. The only problem for the chimpanzee is: the desired fruit is beyond its cage beyond its reach. The two sticks that psychologist Wolfgang Köhler gave the monkey also seem to be of little help to him. After all, they are pretty short. So what to do? If humans and animals could only learn about conditioning, the story would have ended at this point and the Sultan would have remained hungry. But things turned out differently. In fact, for a long time, Sultan struggled in vain with the two short sticks. Frustrated and pouting, he squatted in his cage. But then Sultan had the saving idea. He turned to the sticks and put them together. With the longer stick he could get the coveted fruit.

In the course of his experiments in the 1920s, Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967) interpreted Sultan’s approach as a case of insightful learning. So the monkey solved the problem suddenly and not gradually through trial and error. Once he cracked the nut, he could always solve the problem. In addition, Köhler’s chimpanzees were able to generalize their insights and apply them to new problems. Sultan didn’t just stack boxes around to get bananas hanging high up. In another case, he used this idea to achieve the same goal with other tools. He was not always picky. Once Wolfgang Köhler himself had to serve and serve as a platform.

Associative versus cognitive learning

Much of what humans or animals learn cannot be explained through trial and error and conditioning. For example when we acquire abstract terms, draw complex conclusions or take something home from an article like this. An example explains how purely associative learning differs from cognitive through conditioning. If you teach hunting dogs, for example, to return to the hunter with a certain sound of a dog whistle, it is classic conditioning. A neutral stimulus changes through training into a conditioned one. Now, however, the dogs generally leave other whistles that are intended for other dogs cold. The changed behavior only relates to the acquired conditioned stimulus. The situation with cognitive learning is completely different.

Here, too, is an experiment that Wolfgang Köhler carried out in his experimental station on Tenerife in 1918. He had domestic chickens differentiate between different heights and depths, whereby the lighter shade was the target stimulus that Koehler rewarded to recognize. The psychologist was excited to see what would happen when he presented the chickens with an even brighter tone. Choosing the previously learned target stimulus would be nothing more than learning through association. In fact, the animals opted for the new attraction. They had obviously recognized the relationship between the stimuli as a decisive criterion and transferred the previous learning outcome to the new situation.

Mental representations of the environment

The special thing about cognitive learning is that it is based on internal information processing. The idea behind the so-called cognitive approach in psychology is: Humans and animals – to different degrees, of course – can map their environment mentally and then work with these inner ideas instead of dealing directly with the environment. In the case of Sultan, the cognitive approach can provide some explanatory potential. The animal obviously mentally depicts the problem and internally simulates individual components of this representation until it comes up with a solution that it then uses in the real world. The solution once won is then also still available because the mental representation is constant. Sultan was able to transfer the solution to similar problems, because the representation may be abstract enough not just to depict the original situation.

In many cases, cognitive learning can obviously be divided into two steps. The first is to solve a problem. In a second step the problem solution is stored in the memory. After all, it can be useful again in similar situations. Memory plays an important role in cognitive learning.

memory

Memory is a generic term for all types of information storage in the organism. In addition to the mere retention, this also includes the recording of the information, its order and retrieval.

Mental maps

An early supporter of the cognitive approach to learning was the American psychologist Edward Tolman. In the 1930s and 1940s he was troubled by the problem of how rats learn a way through a complicated labyrinth. Tolman’s idea: rats make a cognitive map of the labyrinth, the arrangement of which they depict mentally. Studies by various research teams appear to confirm this assumption. In a typical experimental setup, rats encounter food at the end of each branch of a labyrinth. Your task is to go to each of these branches without entering one twice. As the experiments show, the small rodents learn fairly quickly – even if you cover the smell of food with aftershave in branches that have not yet been visited. Incidentally, the rats do not proceed systematically, but look for the branches in a random order. So obviously they are not simply learning a rigid sequence of reactions. It is more likely that they will actually develop a kind of mental map of the labyrinth, which also shows which branch they have been in.

In the meantime, researchers have also identified potential neural correlates of cognitive maps. So-called space cells in the hippocampus play an important role, which is important for long-term memory and spatial orientation. Individual space cells represent different places in the environment. The entirety of all these cells form a map of the entire environment. (See video: Spatial Memory) In 2009, psychologist Joseph Manns from Emory University and neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum from Boston University began the activity of several dozen pyramidal cells in the rat hippocampus , They found that the activity patterns of many pyramid cells reflected the location and identity of an object.

hippocampus

The hippocampus is the largest part of the archicortex and an area in the temporal lobe. It is also an important part of the limbic system. Functionally, he is involved in memory processes, but also in spatial orientation. It comprises the subiculum, the dentate gyrus and the ammonshorn with its four fields CA1-CA4.

Changes in the structure of the hippocampus due to stress are associated with pain chronification. The hippocampus also plays an important role in increasing pain from fear.

Long-term memory

A relatively stable memory of events that happened in the somewhat distant past. In long-term memory, content is stored almost indefinitely. Different memory contents lie in different brain areas. The cellular basis for these learning processes is based on improved communication between two cells and is called long-term potentiation.

memory

Memory is a generic term for all types of information storage in the organism. In addition to pure keeping, these include also the Inclusion of information, its order and retrieval.

pyramidal cells

Pyramid cells are the most common neurons in the cortex (cerebral cortex). They are particularly large and their “three-pronged” cell body is reminiscent of a cone or a pyramid in the sectional view.

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