Adaptive Mechanisms in Cortical Networks Underlying Cortical Contributions to Learning and Nondeclarative Memory

The purpose of this paper is to summarize our research progress in studies of the dynamic mechanisms of the cerebral cortex underlying its contributions to learning and nondeclarative memory in experiments conducted over the past five years. Five years ago, we and other workers (see below) had discovered that the details of cortical representations could be altered by peripheral lesions in adult primates. Furthermore, we argued that the cortical representational reorganization in somatosensory (SI) cortical fields following peripheral nerve injuries did not merely reflect the existence of aberrantly sprouted connections (see Merrill and Wall 1978), but must manifest normal dynamic cortical processes by which the selective, distributed responses of cortical neurons—cortical “maps”—are shaped by our experiences throughout life (Merzenich et al. 1983b, 1984a,b; Merzenich 1986). We set out to confirm and extend preliminary behavioral/physiological experiments in somatosensory cortical area 3b that supported this conclusion; to determine how such distributed representational...