Increasing dopamine levels in the brain improves feedback-based procedural 
learning in healthy participants: An artificial-grammar-learning experiment

De Vries, Meinou; Ulte, Catrin; Zwitserlood, Pienie; Szymanski, Barbara; Knecht, Stefan

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.06.024

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Increasing dopamine levels in the brain improves feedback-based procedural learning in healthy participants: An artificial-grammar-learning experiment

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De Vries, Meinou
Neurobiology of Language Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Department of Psychology and Education, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands;

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De Vries, M., Ulte, C., Zwitserlood, P., Szymanski, B., & Knecht, S. (2010). Increasing dopamine levels in the brain improves feedback-based procedural learning in healthy participants: An artificial-grammar-learning experiment. Neuropsychologia, 48, 3193-3197. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.06.024.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0012-C715-1

Abstract

Recently, an increasing number of studies have suggested a role for the basal ganglia and related dopamine inputs in procedural learning, specifically when learning occurs through trial-by-trial feedback (Shohamy, Myers, Kalanithi, & Gluck. (2008). Basal ganglia and dopamine contributions to probabilistic category learning. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 32, 219–236). A necessary relationship has however only been demonstrated in patient studies. In the present study, we show for the first time that increasing dopamine levels in the brain improves the gradual acquisition of complex information in healthy participants. We implemented two artificial-grammar-learning tasks, one with and one without performance feedback. Learning was improved after levodopa intake for the feedback-based learning task only, suggesting that dopamine plays a specific role in trial-by-trial feedback-based learning. This provides promising directions for future studies on dopaminergic modulation of cognitive functioning.