Neuronal Bases of Systemic Organization of Behavior.

Despite the years of studies in the field of systems neuroscience, functions of neural circuits and behavior-related systems are still not entirely clear. The systems description of brain activity has recently been associated with cognitive concepts, e.g. a cognitive map, reconstructed via place-cell activity analysis and the like, and a cognitive schema, modeled in consolidation research. The issue we find of importance is that a cognitive unit reconstructed in neuroscience research is mainly formulated in terms of environment. In other words, the individual experience is considered as a model or reflection of the outside world and usually lacks a biological meaning, such as describing a given part of the world for the individual. In this chapter, we present the idea of a cognitive component that serves as a model of behavioral interaction with environment, rather than a model of the environment itself. This intangible difference entails the need in substantial revision of several well-known phenomena, including the long-term potentiation.The principal questions developed here are how the cognitive units appear and change upon learning and performance, and how the links between them create the whole structure of individual experience. We argue that a clear distinction between processes that provide the emergence of new components and those underlying the retrieval and/or changes in the existing ones is necessary in learning and memory research. We then describe a view on learning and corresponding neuronal activity analysis that may help set this distinction.

Sample Entropy of the Heart Rate Reflects Properties of the System Organization of Behaviour.

Cardiac activity is involved in the processes of organization of goal-directed behaviour. Each behavioural act is aimed at achieving an adaptive outcome and it is subserved by the actualization of functional systems consisting of elements distributed across the brain and the rest of the body. This paper proposes a system-evolutionary view on the activity of the heart and its variability. We have compared the irregularity of the heart rate, as measured by sample entropy (SampEn), in behaviours that are subserved by functional systems formed at different stages of individual development, which implement organism-environment interactions with different degrees of differentiation. The results have shown that SampEn of the heart rate was higher during performing tasks that included later acquired knowledge (foreign language vs. native language; mathematical vocabulary vs. general vocabulary) and decreased in the stress and alcohol conditions, as well as at the beginning of learning. These results are in line with the hypothesis that irregularity of the heart rate reflects the properties of a set of functional systems subserving current behaviour, with higher irregularity corresponding to later acquired and more complex behaviour.