How social-reward hormones modulate language learning

How social-reward hormones modulate language learning

Constantina Theofanopoulou

Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

A growing amount of evidence supports the decisive role of several hormones in the motivational circuits that underlie language learning. Independent studies have highlighted the importance of three hormones in our social reward system: oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin. The aim of this study is firstly, to construct a synthetic framework of the brain circuits where oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin interactions mediate motivation (at the level of connectivity and brain rhythms), based mostly on animal studies (mice, prairie voles, songbirds), and secondly, to show that this framework may also account for the human reward system subserving language learning. For this second goal, we relied on a Pubmed search of studies pertinent to the localization of these hormones in the human brain and the effects they exert at a behavioral level, and backed up the information we found searching in the Allen Brain Atlas for information concerning which brain areas the genes of these hormones and their receptors and transporters are expressed. For brain rhythms’ concerns, we focused on experimental results pointing towards a modulatory role of these hormones upon slow waves, which are thought to be critical for memory consolidation