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PubMed1997

GABAergic modulation of hippocampal population activity: sequence learning, place field development, and the phase precession effect.

A detailed biophysical model of hippocampal region CA3 was constructed to study how GABAergic modulation influences place field development and the learning and recall of sequence information. Simulations included 1,000 multicompartmental pyramidal cells, each consisting of seven intrinsic and four synaptic currents, and 200 multicompartmental interneurons, consisting of two intrinsic and four synaptic currents. Excitatory rhythmic septal input to the apical dendrites of pyramidal cells and both excitatory and inhibitory input to interneurons at theta frequencies provided a cellular basis for the development of theta and gamma frequency oscillations in population activity. The fundamental frequency of theta oscillations was dictated by the driving rhythm from the septum. Gamma oscillation frequency, however, was determined by both the decay time of the gamma-aminobutyric acid-A (GABA(A))-receptor-mediated synaptic current and the overall level of excitability in interneurons due to alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole proprionic acid and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-receptor-gated channel activation. During theta population activity, total GABA(B)-receptor-mediated conductance levels were found to gradually rise and fall in rhythmic fashion with the predominant population frequency (theta rhythm). This resulted in periodic GABA(B)-receptor-mediated suppression of excitatory synaptic transmission at recurrent collaterals (intrinsic fibers) of pyramidal cells and suppression of inhibitory synaptic transmission to both pyramidal cells and interneurons. To test the ability of the model to learn and recall temporal sequence information, a completion task was employed. During learning, the network was presented a sequence of nonorthogonal spatial patterns. Each input pattern represented a spatial "location" of a simulated rat running a specific navigational path. Hebbian-type learning was expressed as an increase in postsynaptic NMDA-receptor-mediated conductances. Because of several factors including the sparse, asymmetric excitatory synaptic connections among pyramidal cells in the model and a sufficient degree of random "background" firing unrelated to the input patterns, repeated simulated runs resulted in the gradual emergence of place fields where a given cell began to respond to a contiguous segment of locations on the path. During recall, the simulated rat was placed at a random location on the previously learned path and tested to see whether the sequence of locations could be completed on the basis of this initial position. Periodic GABA(B)-receptor-mediated suppression of excitatory and inhibitory transmission at intrinsic but not afferent fibers resulted in sensory information about location being dominant during early portions of each theta cycle when GABA(B)-receptor-related effects were highest. This suppression declined with levels of GABA(B) receptor activation toward the end of a theta cycle, resulting in an increase in synaptic transmission at intrinsic fibers and the subsequent recall of a segment of the entire location sequence. This scenario typically continued across theta cycles until the full sequence was recalled. When the GABA(B)-receptor-mediated suppression of excitatory and inhibitory transmission at intrinsic fibers was not included in the model, place field development was curtailed and the network consequently exhibited poor learning and recall performance. This was, in part, due to increased competition of information from intrinsic and afferent fibers during early portions of each theta cycle. Because afferent sensory information did not dominate early in each cycle, the current location of the rat was obscured by ongoing activity from intrinsic sources. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

Animals↗
PubMed1994

Memory enhancement after drinking ethanol: consolidation, interference, or response bias?

One explanation for memory facilitation is that alcohol has a short-term neurochemical stimulating effect on consolidating neural networks when material is learned before drinking. Contrary to the consolidation hypothesis, when the consolidation interval was manipulated the results showed that the effects of alcohol were not time dependent. Compared to placebo subjects, alcohol significantly facilitated the recall of 25 words whether administered immediately or 40 min after learning. In addition, alcohol significantly increased the memory of words associated with pictures when incidentally learned before drinking and significantly decreased incidental learning after drinking. Another explanation for memory facilitation is that alcohol's depressive physiological effect impairs the acquisition of new information, like sleeping after learning, and enhances memory by reducing subsequent interference. Consistent with the retroactive interference hypothesis, the effects of alcohol reduced interpolated interference, were greater on recall than recognition, and were immune to time delays. Contemporary theories view memory enhancement attributed to alcohol as indirectly influencing response biases and contextual cues associated with retrieval from episodic memory.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Algebraic geometrical methods for hierarchical learning machines.

Hierarchical learning machines such as layered perceptrons, radial basis functions, Gaussian mixtures are non-identifiable learning machines, whose Fisher information matrices are not positive definite. This fact shows that conventional statistical asymptotic theory cannot be applied to neural network learning theory, for example either the Bayesian a posteriori probability distribution does not converge to the Gaussian distribution, or the generalization error is not in proportion to the number of parameters. The purpose of this paper is to overcome this problem and to clarify the relation between the learning curve of a hierarchical learning machine and the algebraic geometrical structure of the parameter space. We establish an algorithm to calculate the Bayesian stochastic complexity based on blowing-up technology in algebraic geometry and prove that the Bayesian generalization error of a hierarchical learning machine is smaller than that of a regular statistical model, even if the true distribution is not contained in the parametric model.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1981

Reflections on the treatment process by nonabstinent alcoholics.

This study reports on the subjective evaluations of treatment by 162 patients who had been treated and discharged with staff approval at Hazelden Rehabilitation Center. At 2 years following treatment, these patients were asked to comment on what they considered the most important aspects of their treatment experience. Four principal groupings of comments emerged as being most important: (1) Formal Hazelden activities, i.e., lectures, counseling; (2) Inner-directed learning, i.e., understanding, insight; (3) Informal Hazelden activities, i.e., personal friendships, fellowship; and (4) General learning, i.e., effect of alcohol on mind and body. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the utility of evaluating treatment effectiveness through the subjective judgments of the treated patients.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Teaching health assessment in the virtual classroom.

Health assessment skills are vital to professional nursing practice. Health assessment has traditionally been taught using lecture, teacher-developed tests, practice and live demonstration, and interactive and computer-based learning materials. Rapid advances in information technology during the past decade have greatly expanded distance learning options in higher education. Although much nursing education now uses the Internet, there has been limited use of the Web to teach psychomotor and clinical skills. This article describes how online instruction can be integrated into a health assessment course to teach physical examination skills. The development of instructional videos that can be digitally streamed onto the Web for ready and repeated access can also enhance online learning of technical and clinical skills. Student evaluation of this Web-enhanced course revealed that online assignments enabled them to pace their learning, thereby promoting greater flexibility and independence. Students were able to master the technical skills of working online with minimal difficulty and reported that working online was no more stressful than attending class. The most helpful aspect of the online course was the instructor-developed video that was digitally streamed online.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1995

American Health Information Management Association. Position statement. Issue: Educational clinical affiliations.

In the realm of health information management, the clinical affiliation refers to the course(s) in which the student reports to a healthcare facility and experiences planned activities in the environment of the actual workplace. The provision for technical and managerial experiences is an integral component of the curricula. The importance of the clinical affiliation to health information management education is immeasurable. Through the application of didactic learning, the theories of health information management are reinforced, the dynamics of the workplace are observed, and the realistic dimension of the profession is added. No amount of classroom simulation can replace it. Objectives of an affiliation should include but are not limited to: 1) development of the student as a person responsible for actions and outcomes, 2) acquisition of the knowledge and skills needed for entry level competency, 3) recognition of the needs of patients and clients, and 4) adherence to the mission, policies, and procedures of an organization.

Clinical Clerkship↗
PubMed1998

Stop wasting your training dollars! How to use integrative learning.

To succeed in today's competitive world, companies need to continually train their employees to do new jobs and to perform old jobs better. Unfortunately, most on-the-job education and training is wasted, since traditional methods do not get workers to retain what they have learned. This article describes a new method of education, integrative learning, that takes into account that each person has multiple kinds of intelligence and also has his or her own style of learning. By changing the learning environment and the way information is presented, processed, and used in the classroom, integrative learning produces substantially better results than traditional methods.

Cost Savings↗
PubMed1993

[Hypermedia software for teaching anatomy of the upper abdomen with computerized tomography and magnetic resonance].

The authors have developed a hypermedia program for creating a tutorial of CT and MR anatomy of the upper abdomen. The program was created on a Mcintosh computer, with the Supercard software: it is made up of a series of windows, each of them containing images, texts, schematic representations and sound. Moreover, each window contains buttons which are activated with the mouse and allow different kinds of function, all created by the authors to be displayed. In particular, navigation buttons allow the users to move in the program either sequentially or non-linearly, according to their needs. The possibility of obtaining information and schematic representations is given by specific buttons. There are also multiple buttons hidden in the images which, when activated, allow the name of the selected organ to be displayed. In conclusion, this program can be especially helpful since it allows different data sets to be integrated to provide the user with complete information. Moreover, the program allows learning to be controlled, that is the user to be informed on timing and methods for more effective studying.

Abdomen↗
PubMed1994

The neurobiology of learning: implications for treatment of adults with brain injury.

The effectiveness of occupational therapy interventions for adults with brain injury is largely dependent on how well clients are able to learn the new strategies, techniques, and information therapists are trying to teach them. Neuroscience research in the past two decades has provided some intriguing hints about the neurological processes that may underlie that learning. Understanding this research might stimulate new occupational therapy ideas about more effective ways to facilitate recovery and learning in adults with brain injury. This review presents an overview of the physical, biochemical, and electrical changes in nerve cells that have been found to accompany learning in adults with and without brain injury. Recommendations for treatment derived from the review include teaching to clients' levels of learning and information-processing strengths.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Human and social capital as facilitators of lifelong learning in nursing.

To ensure that lifelong learning is, and remains, a reality as a vehicle for facilitating continuing professional learning in nursing, certain mechanisms need to be instituted specifically for this purpose. Some of the key organisational facilitators for achieving this include individual performance reviews, Workforce Development Confederations, professional self-regulation, and Investors in People awards. In a study exploring nurses' perceptions of lifelong learning, it emerged that in addition to the organisational mechanisms that are necessary to achieve this aspiration, there are also various non-organisational or informal factors at work that enable nurses to initiate and continue professional learning. It seems that substantial informal teaching, learning and facilitation of learning occur through work-based contacts with other healthcare professionals, and this is complemented by support from non-healthcare related other significant individuals. These factors seem to constitute the notion of human and social capital (HSC), which is a concept that has been implicated as a significant instigator or enabler of professional learning. This paper examines these non-organisational factors, clarifies the meanings and roles of human capital and social capital in healthcare, and discusses their implications for lifelong learning in nursing. The analysis is supported by findings from a qualitative study, which comprised of 27 semi-structured individual interviews and two focus groups with RNs on D grade and above.

Education, Nursing, Continuing↗
PubMed2001

Attitudes towards transferable skills in medical undergraduates.

CONTEXT: Changes to the style of medical teaching will place a greater responsibility on individual medical students to manage their own learning, highlighting the need for students to develop good so-called 'transferable' skills at an early stage in their undergraduate career. OBJECTIVES: To assess the attitudes of first year undergraduates towards transferable skills, and investigate the gender difference in these attitudes. To assess the contribution of their first year course to skills development. SUBJECTS: First year students, enrolled on a traditional-style course. METHOD: A questionnaire asking the students to consider: (a) the importance of named transferable skills for medicine; (b) their own ability in these areas; and (c) the influence of their first year course. RESULTS: All students, irrespective of gender, regarded transferable skills as very important to medicine, rating organizational skills and self-learning skills as most important. Overall, students have a high level of confidence in their own skills. Male students rated their overall level of skills more highly than women. In particular they rated their information handling, managing self-learning and technical skills more highly. Students feel that their first year course has enhanced their skills in most areas. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that students will feel equipped to succeed in a learning system which places the onus on them to take responsibility for their own learning. They clearly believe that they have the necessary skills for independent learning. The study highlights the need to enhance students' self-evaluation skills.

Attitude↗
PubMed2006

Parameter learning from stochastic teachers and stochastic compulsive liars.

This paper considers a general learning problem akin to the field of learning automata (LA) in which the learning mechanism attempts to learn from a stochastic teacher or a stochastic compulsive liar. More specifically, unlike the traditional LA model in which LA attempts to learn the optimal action offered by the Environment (also here called the "Oracle"), this paper considers the problem of the learning mechanism (robot, an LA, or in general, an algorithm) attempting to learn a "parameter" within a closed interval. The problem is modeled as follows: The learning mechanism is trying to locate an unknown point on a real interval by interacting with a stochastic Environment through a series of informed guesses. For each guess, the Environment essentially informs the mechanism, possibly erroneously (i.e., with probability p), which way it should move to reach the unknown point. When the probability of a correct response is p > 0.5, the Environment is said to be informative, and thus the case of learning from a stochastic teacher. When this probability p < 0.5, the Environment is deemed deceptive, and is called a stochastic compulsive liar. This paper describes a novel learning strategy by which the unknown parameter can be learned in both environments. These results are the first reported results, which are applicable to the latter scenario. The most significant contribution of this paper is that the proposed scheme is shown to operate equally well, even when the learning mechanism is unaware of whether the Environment ("Oracle") is informative or deceptive. The learning strategy proposed herein, called CPL-AdS, partitions the search interval into d subintervals, evaluates the location of the unknown point with respect to these subintervals using fast-converging E-optimal LRI LA, and prunes the search space in each iteration by eliminating at least one partition. The CPL-AdS algorithm is shown to provably converge to the unknown point with an arbitrary degree of accuracy with probability as close to unity as desired. Comprehensive experimental results confirm the fast and accurate convergence of the search for a wide range of values for the Environment's feedback accuracy parameter p, and thus has numerous potential applications.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1993

Visual input and lateralization of brain function in learning in the chick.

Several lines of evidence (biochemical, neuroanatomical, electrophysiological, and behavioural) have indicated a critical role for the intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale of the chick forebrain in the acquisition of a passive avoidance response. Previous lesion studies indicated that bilateral or left, but not right, pretraining intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale lesions interfere with the acquisition of this task. We have further analysed this asymmetrical involvement of the intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale by use of a monocular learning protocol and intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale lesions (sham, bilateral, or unilateral). The results indicated that there is interocular transfer of information of passive avoidance learning between the two eye systems, with a tendency to be more successful from the right eye system to the left than in the opposite direction. As in binocular conditions, bilateral pretraining intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale lesions impair learning in monocularly trained animals. Unilateral lesions to either left or right monocularly trained experimental animals resulted in amnesia when they were made to the right intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale and the chicks were trained/tested with the left eye open. These results indicate that, although right intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale lesions do not result in amnesia in binocular animals, this region is capable of participating in memory acquisition processes. They also suggest a connection between lateralization of intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrale function in passive avoidance learning and the behavioural and structural visual asymmetries known to occur in chicks.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Attributing social and physical meaning to ambiguous visual displays in individuals with higher-functioning autism spectrum disorders.

The weak central coherence (WCC) account of autism characterizes the learning style of individuals with this condition as favoring localized and fragmented (to the detriment of global and integrative) processing of information. This pattern of learning is thought to lead to deficits in aspects of perception (e.g., face processing), cognition, and communication (e.g., focus on disjointed details rather than "gist" or context), ultimately leading to social impairments. This study was carried out to examine whether WCC applies to social and to non-social aspects of learning alike, or, alternatively, some areas of learning (e.g., physical reasoning) are spared in autism. classic social animation as quantified in the Social Attribution Task (SAT) () and a novel animation involving physical reasoning (the Physical Attribution Task; PAT) were used to test the domain specificity of the WCC hypothesis. A pilot study involving a reference group of typically developing young adults and a group of individuals with higher-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) revealed gender differences in the reference group in regards to performance on the PAT (males outperformed females). In a follow-up case-control comparison involving only males where the ASD group was matched on age and IQ to a typically developing (TD) group of children, adolescents, and adults, the ASD group showed lower SAT scores and comparable PAT scores relative to the TD group. The interaction of diagnostic group by task was highly significant, with little overlap between the groups in the distributions of SAT minus PAT scores. These results indicated preserved integrative skills in the area of physical attribution in the ASD group, thus failing to support the WCC account as a domain-independent (or more general) model of learning in autism, while highlighting the centrality of the social deficits in the characterization of learning style in the autism spectrum disorders.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Traumatic brain injury produces delay-dependent memory impairment in rats.

Memory impairment following traumatic brain injury (TBI) is common in both humans and animals. A noteworthy feature of memory dysfunction in human TBI is impaired memory performance that is dependent on the delay between initial learning and recall of information. However, previous studies of TBI-induced memory impairment in animals have failed to control for the initial amount of learning between sham and injured animals. The present study demonstrates that experimental TBI in rats produces delay-dependent memory impairment, even when the initial degree of learning is controlled for. Animals were injured at a moderate level of lateral fluid percussion (LFP) injury (n = 10) or received a sham injury (n = 9), and then trained in a water T-maze version of the delayed-non-matching-to-place (DNMP) task beginning 10 days post-injury. Acquisition training consisted of 15 trials per day on post-injury days 11-15 using a minimal (7-sec) delay between the sample and choice phases of the task. Following acquisition, the delay between the sample and choice phases of the task was progressively increased to 15, 30, and 120 sec. Injured animals acquired the task at the same rate as sham animals and performed equally well at the 15-sec delay (p > 0.05). However, as the delay increased to 30 and 120 sec, the performance of the injured animals deteriorated (p < 0.05). These results indicate that LFP injury produces delay-dependent memory impairments in rats. This is therefore a valid model of an important feature of memory impairment in human TBI, and should be a useful addition to the available methods for assessing memory impairment and the effect of therapeutic interventions after TBI.

Animals↗
PubMed1998

Correlating fibreoptic nasotracheal endoscopy performance and psychomotor aptitude.

We have investigated the correlation between the scores attained on computerized psychometric tests, measuring psychomotor and information processing aptitudes, and learning fibreoptic endoscopy with the videoendoscope. Sixteen anaesthetic trainees performed two adaptive tracking tasks (ADTRACK 2 and ADTRACK 3) and one information management task (MAZE) from the MICROPAT testing system. They then embarked on a standardized fibreoptic training programme during which they performed 15 supervised fibreoptic nasotracheal intubations on anaesthetized oral surgery patients. There was a significant correlation between the means of the 15 endoscopy times and both ADTRACK 2 (r = -0.599, P = 0.014) and ADTRACK 3 (r = -0.589, P = 0.016) scores. The correlation between the means of the 15 endoscopy times and MAZE scores was not significant. The ratios of the mean endoscopy time for the last seven endoscopies to the mean endoscopy time for the first seven endoscopies were not significantly correlated with ADTRACK 2, ADTRACK 3 or MAZE scores. Psychomotor abilities appeared to be determinants of trainees' initial proficiency in endoscopy, but did not appear to be determinants of trainees' rates of progress during early fibreoptic training.

Anesthesiology↗