Disruption of Broca's Area Alters Higher-order Chunking Processing during Perceptual Sequence Learning
(2016) Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience — Vol. 28, n° 3, p. 402-417 (2016)
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- Because Broca's area is known to be involved in many cognitive functions, including language, music, and action processing, several attempts have been made to propose a unifying theory of its role that emphasizes a possible contribution to syntactic processing. Recently, we have postulated that Broca's area might be involved in higher-order chunk processing during implicit learning of a motor sequence. Chunking is an information-processing mechanism that consists of grouping consecutive items in a sequence and is likely to be involved in all of the aforementioned cognitive processes. Demonstrating a contribution of Broca's area to chunking during the learning of a nonmotor sequence that does not involve language could shed new light on its function. To address this issue, we used offline MRI-guided TMS in healthy volunteers to disrupt the activity of either the posterior part of Broca's area (left Brodmann's area [BA] 44) or a control site just before participants learned a perceptual sequence structured in distinct hierarchical levels. We found that disruption of the left BA 44 increased the processing time of stimuli representing the boundaries of higher-order chunks and modified the chunking strategy. The current results highlight the possible role of the left BA 44 in building up effector-independent representations of higher-order events in structured sequences. This might clarify the contribution of Broca's area in processing hierarchical structures, a key mechanism in many cognitive functions, such as language and composite actions.
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Alamia, A., Solopchuk, O., D’Ausilio, A., Van Bever, V., Fadiga, L., Olivier, E., & Zenon, A. (2016). Disruption of Broca’s Area Alters Higher-order Chunking Processing during Perceptual Sequence Learning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 28(3), 402-417. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00911 (Original work published 2016)