Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 17, Issue 8, Pages 700-707Publisher
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01769.x
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NCRR NIH HHS [M01RR00051] Funding Source: Medline
- NIMH NIH HHS [MH069597-01, MH64812-01] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
People often make logically sound decisions using explicit reasoning strategies, but sometimes it pays to rely on more implicit gut-level intuition. The transitive inference paradigm has been widely used as a test of explicit logical reasoning in animals and humans, but it can also be solved in a more implicit manner. Some researchers have argued that the hippocampus supports relational memories required for making logical inferences. Here we show that the benzodiazepene midazolam, which inactivates the hippocampus, causes profound explicit memory deficits in healthy participants, but enhances their ability in making implicit transitive inferences. These results are consistent with neurocomputational models of the basal ganglia-dopamine system that learn to make decisions through positive and negative reinforcement. We suggest that disengaging the hippocampal explicit memory system can be advantageous for this more implicit form of learning.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available