Schedule of Events | Symposia

Changes of brain activity across development during implicit learning of temporal regularity

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Wei Tang¹ (wt1@iu.edu), Pradyumna Lanka², Zhenghan Qi²; ¹Indiana University Bloomington, ²Northeastern University

Statistical regularities in the environment can shape brain activity to facilitate perception without explicit feedback. Such neural plasticity enables individuals, even as infants, to acquire perceptual, cognitive and linguistic knowledge and adapt to their surroundings. In this poster we present a study that investigates how statistical learning facilitates visual perception in young adults and children. We asked participants in an fMRI experiment to respond to a cued target in each presented sequence of pictorial stimuli by a button press. Unbeknownst to the participants, we embedded triplets in half of the sequences and mixed them with the other half randomly ordered sequences. Using a hidden Markov model to identify multi-voxel brain representations, we analyzed the representational similarity of structured and randomly presented stimuli across brain regions. Our results suggest that multiple brain regions process temporally associated items differently than those presented in random order. In particular, the medial temporal lobe, striatum and primary visual cortex all showed patterns of chunking for processing triplets, regardless of the type of stimuli that composed the triplets. Moreover, activity in the nucleus accumbens and V1 showed changes across development, suggesting potential differences in the learning outcome, such that the children’s brain may become more sensitive to lower-level visual features and the adult brain more sensitive to generalized temporal structures. Both effects could facilitate perception but would involve different brain mechanisms.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Development & aging