On Apr 6, 2009, at 1:54 PM, Mike Palij wrote:
On Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:13:50 -0700, Paul Brandon writes:
Actually, there's no conflict between being a rat running behaviorist
and believing that the CNS (central or conceptual as the case may be)
What's that sound? Is that B.F. spinning in his grave?
No.
is an integrated interactive system all of which is involved in any
given instance of behavior. And of course we talk a great deal
about verbally mediated behavior in all of its complexity.
I may be mistaken but I think my original point has been lost:
(1) Conditioning studies involving animals [insert your favorite
species here]
including humans
may have questionable generalizability to humans because animals
do not have language or high level symbolic processing capability
see the operant conditioning literature on Stimulus Equivalence and
Relational Framing.
Neither process has been convincingly demonstrated with nonhuman
subjects.
They are an integral part of verbal behavior in all its glory.
that would mediate their learning. Thus, the results of studies like
that described in the NY Times can only be speculatively extended
to humans. Especially if one is going to link human dementias to
the use of a drug that blocks the formation of long-term memories.
Examination of one of the relevant articles for the NYT story makes
it clear that the researchers are using the term memory in a very
broad
way but relies heavily on associative learning mechanisms; see:
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-
document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060318&ct=1
(2) Perhaps long-term memories of conditioning are purely mediated
by PKMzeta in rodents and maybe it applies to some limited cases of
conditioning in humans but it is unlikely to be plausible for many/
most human
long-term memories. The classic "levels of processing" experimental
result showing that processing a word's appearance results in poorer
memory than processing its meaning is clearly a problem if one relies
upon a molecular mechanism or a single neuron mechanism (the problem
is similar to that for the classic "grandmother" or "yellow
volkswagen" account
of pattern recognition). At the very least, a neural circuit is
needed and
perhaps a more complex neural network is needed if one is going to
rely
on purely associative mechanisms in contrast to general rule and
symbol
architectures.
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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Paul Brandon
10 Crown Hill Lane
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