Slow negative potential shifts indicating verbal cognitive learning in a concept formation task.
It is well-known clinically that patients with left frontal lesions are impaired in their verbal-cognitive learning ability. Starting from such observations, it is of particular interest whether the event-related cerebral potential shifts recorded in healthy human subjects would indicate a left frontal lobe involvement in verbal-cognitive learning tasks. In a concept formation paradigm, subjects learned by trial and error to transform letters into Morse codes. This cognitive performance was accompanied by a slow negative potential shift (SP) that in frontal recordings was lateralized towards the left hemisphere. off results show in a later stage of learning, in which the experience of the preceding trial and error learning could be integrated, an increasing slow negativity over the frontal cortex. Ss also participated in a control task with already known letter/Morse code combinations. Again, a negative potential shift occurred within the stimulus-response interval, however, it was smaller in amplitude.
Lang
M
M
Neurological Clinic, University of Ulm, FRG.
Lang
W
W
Uhl
F
F
Kornhuber
A
A
Deecke
L
L
Kornhuber
H H
HH
D000328:Adult; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology