Research
Lateral orbitofrontal cortex enables new learning to overwrite previously acquired information
Current Biology · By Maedeh Mahmoudi, Joanne M. Gladding, Michael D. Kendig, Alessandro Castorina, Karly M. Turner, Octavia Soegyono & Laura A. Bradfield ·
The Brief
- A study by Mahmoudi et al. finds that contingency degradation resists spontaneous recovery and reinstatement.
- Learning in contingency degradation, but not retrieval, depends on the lateral orbitofrontal cortex.
- The authors suggest that, unlike extinction, degradation overwrites previously acquired information.
Why it matters
The results suggest that degradation and extinction are different forms of learning, which matters for how researchers model the overwriting of learned associations.
Who’s affected
- neuroscientists studying learning and memory
- researchers studying the orbitofrontal cortex
- #orbitofrontal cortex
- #contingency degradation
- #extinction
- #learning
- #memory
- #neuroscience
Mahmoudi et al. show here that contingency degradation is resistant to spontaneous recovery and reinstatement and that its learning, but not retrieval, depends on the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. Together, these findings suggest that unlike extinction, degradation overwrites…
Timeline
Study published in Current Biology
cell.com
Lateral orbitofrontal cortex enables new learning to overwrite previously acquired information