Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Investigating the Neural and Behavioural Consequences of Rhythmic Auditory Priming on Statistical Learning

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Émilie Rae Hoeppner¹ (ehoeppne@uwo.ca), Laura Batterink¹, Karli Nave¹; ¹Western University

Statistical learning is the process of becoming sensitive to patterns in the environment simply through exposure. During this process, neural activity aligns with the detected patterns, a phenomenon known as neural entrainment. A central question is whether neural entrainment functionally contributes to statistical learning or whether it merely reflects downstream aspects of the learning process. The current study will address this question using an auditory rhythmic priming approach, which has been previously shown to modulate neural entrainment and enhance aspects of language processing. Participants will listen to musical rhythms, which will be followed immediately by artificial language streams containing repeating trisyllabic words. Critically, the underlying beat of the rhythms will either align with the word presentation frequency (congruent condition), or conflict with the word frequency (incongruent condition). Participants’ EEG will be recorded throughout the exposure period to measure neural entrainment to the repeating patterns. Following exposure, participants’ learning will be assessed behaviourally using both explicit memory tests and an implicit, reaction-time based target detection task. We hypothesize that participants in the congruent condition will demonstrate increased neural entrainment at the word frequency as well as enhanced statistical learning outcomes relative to participants in the incongruent condition. Our findings will offer insight into whether neural entrainment functionally contributes to statistical learning.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other