RT Journal Article
T1 Unraveling the Role of the Hippocampus in Reversal Learning.
A1 Vila-Ballo, Adria
A1 Mas-Herrero, Ernest
A1 Ripollés, Pablo
A1 Simó, Marta
A1 Miró, Júlia
A1 Cucurell, David
A1 López-Barroso, Diana
A1 Juncadella, Montserrat
A1 Marco-Pallarés, Josep
A1 Falip, Mercé
A1 Rodriguez-Fornells, Antoni
K1 Epilepsia
K1 Hipocampo (Cerebro)
K1 Aprendizaje
K1 Neurociencias
AB Research in reversal learning has mainly focused on the functional role of dopamine and striatal structures in driving behavior on the basis ofclassic reinforcement learning mechanisms. However, recent evidence indicates that, beyond classic reinforcement learning adaptations, individualsmay also learn the inherent task structure and anticipate the occurrence of reversals. A candidate structure to support such taskrepresentation is the hippocampus, which might create a flexible representation of the environment that can be adaptively applied to goaldirectedbehavior.Toinvestigate the functional role of thehippocampusin the implementation of anticipatory strategies in reversal learning,wefirst studied, in 20 healthy individuals (11 women), whether the gray matter anatomy and volume of the hippocampus were related to anticipatorystrategies in a reversal learning task. Second,wetested 20 refractory temporal lobe epileptic patients (11women)with unilateral hippocampalsclerosis, who served as a hippocampal lesion model. Our results indicate that healthy participants were able to learn the task structure anduseit toguidetheirbehaviorandoptimizetheirperformance.Participants’ ability toadoptanticipatory strategies correlatedwiththegraymattervolumeof the hippocampus. In contrast, hippocampal patients were unable to grasp the higher-order structure of the task with thesamesuccessthan controls. Present results indicate that the hippocampus is necessary to respond in an appropriately flexible manner to high-order environments,and disruptions in this structure can render behavior habitual and inflexible.
PB Society for Neuroscience (SfN)
YR 2017
FD 2017-07-12
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/45592
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/45592
LA eng
NO Vilà-Balló A, Mas-Herrero E, Ripollés P, Simó M, Miró J, Cucurell D, López-Barroso D, Juncadella M, Marco-Pallarés J, Falip M, Rodríguez-Fornells A. Unraveling the Role of the Hippocampus in Reversal Learning. J Neurosci. 2017 Jul 12;37(28):6686-6697. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3212-16.2017. Epub 2017 Jun 7. PMID: 28592695; PMCID: PMC6596552.
NO https://www.jneurosci.org/content/rights-permissions: Articles published from 2015 to 2025 are under the SfN exclusive license to publish for 6 months; after 6 months, the work becomes available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 26 feb 2026