The Role of the Basal Ganglia as a Link in Category Learning

The psychological research on human learning under laboratory conditions is usually controlled to allow the subjects to acquire a new piece of world knowledge within a certain period of time. Therefore, category learning has become the main task paradigm and one of the hottest research fields in cognitive psychology. The cognitive and neural research on category learning is reviewed and the relationship between the corticostriatal loops and category learning is analyzed. It is proposed that the neural mechanism of category learning is based on the basal ganglia as a link and four corticostriatal loops as the way. The cognitive neural mechanism of category learning are examined from three aspects: learning condition, learning process and learning outcome.