{"pk":28463,"title":"The Role of Basal Ganglia Reinforcement Learning in Lexical Priming andAutomatic Semantic Ambiguity Resolution","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The current study aimed to elucidate the contributions of thesubcortical basal ganglia to human language by adopting theview that these structures engage in a basic neurocomputationthat may account for its involvement across a wide range of lin-guistic phenomena. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis thatbasal ganglia reinforcement learning mechanisms may accountfor variability in semantic selection processes necessary forambiguity resolution. To test this, we used a biased homographlexical ambiguity priming task that allowed us to measure au-tomatic processes for resolving ambiguity towards high fre-quency word meanings. Individual differences in task perfor-mance were then related to indices of basal ganglia function-ing and reinforcement learning, which were used to group sub-jects by learning style: primarily from choosing positive feed-back (Choosers), primarily from avoiding negative feedback(Avoiders), and balanced participants who learned equally wellfrom both (Balanced). The pattern of results suggests that bal-anced individuals, whom learn from both positive and negativereward equally well, had significantly lower access to the sub-ordinate homograph word meaning. Choosers and Avoiders,on the other hand, had higher access to the subordinate wordmeaning even after a long delay between prime and target. Ex-perimental findings were then tested using an ACT-R compu-tational model of reinforcement learning that learns from bothpositive and negative feedback. Results from the computa-tional model confirm and extend the pattern of behavioral find-ings, and provide a reinforcement learning account of lexicalpriming processes in human linguistic abilities, where a dual-path reinforcement learning system is necessary for preciselymapping out word co-occurrence probabilities.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"language; semantics; lexical selection; ambigu-ity resolution; priming; reinforcement learning; basal ganglia;dopamine; cognitive modeling; ACT-R"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6r8632cr","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jose","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Ceballos","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Washington","department":""},{"first_name":"Andrea","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stocco","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Washington","department":""},{"first_name":"Chantel","middle_name":"S.","last_name":"Prat","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Washington","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28463/galley/18334/download/"}]}