Brain signatures of statistical information acquisition in the absence of behavioral learning

BETMAN, ERNESTO; WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO

Encuentro Virtual

Congreso; XXXV Annual Meeting of the Argentinian Society for Neuroscience Research; 2020

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

Statistical information, i.e. the recurrent co-occurence of events or stimuli, underliesmultiple aspects of life, and is a robust source of information for learning. Behavioralresults after training in artificial grammars, have shown that infants and adults sense,store and use statistical information to acquire different aspects of the trained grammar.What happens though, when statistical aspects of the training stimuli are not learned?Does this imply that recurrent stimuli information has not been sensed and/or stored bythe brain? In the present study, 7 year-old children (N=13) were briefly trained in anartificial grammar task involving learning the designations of several figures. Behavioralresponses after training were at chance level, evidencing absence of learning.Electroencephalographic recordings during testing were used to calculate IntersitePhase Clustering, a measure of synchrony between electrode sites. Results showedincreased interhemispheric synchronization when testing trials displayed anincongruence between the figure shown and the designation heard. This increase ofsynchronized activity may facilitate neural integration and information exchangebetween regions, necessary to solve the incongruence of stimuli shown. Moreimportantly, it is evidence that statistical information was indeed sensed and stored, evenin the absence of behavioral learning.