Infants are superior in implicit crossmodal learning and use other learning mechanisms than adults.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Rohlf S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5662286 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Infants are superior in implicit crossmodal learning and use other learning mechanisms than adults.
Rohlf Sophie S Habets Boukje B von Frieling Marco M Röder Brigitte B
eLife 20170926
During development internal models of the sensory world must be acquired which have to be continuously adapted later. We used event-related potentials (ERP) to test the hypothesis that infants extract crossmodal statistics implicitly while adults learn them when task relevant. Participants were passively exposed to frequent standard audio-visual combinations (A1V1, A2V2, p=0.35 each), rare recombinations of these standard stimuli (A1V2, A2V1, p=0.10 each), and a rare audio-visual deviant with in ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:To study the interplay between motor learning and emotional responses of young infants, we developed a contingent learning paradigm that included two related, difficult, operant tasks. We also coded facial expression to characterise emotional response to learning. In a sample of nine-month-old healthy Chinese infants, 44.7% achieved learning threshold during this challenging arm-conditioning test. Some evidence of learning was observed at the beginning of the second task. The lowest period of negative emotions coincided with the period of maximum movement responses after the initiation of the second task, and movement responses negatively correlated with the frequency of negative emotions. Positive emotions, while generally low throughout the task, increased during peak performance especially for learners. Peak frequency of movement responses was positively correlated with the frequency of positive emotions. Despite the weak evidence of learning this difficult task, our results from the learners would suggest that increasing positive emotions, and perhaps down-regulating negative emotional responses, may be important for improving performance and learning a complex operant task in infancy. Further studies are necessary to determine the role of emotions in learning difficult tasks in infancy.
| S-EPMC5097020 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Human learning is supported by multiple neural mechanisms that maturate at different rates and interact in mostly cooperative but also sometimes competitive ways. We tested the hypothesis that mature cognitive mechanisms constrain implicit statistical learning mechanisms that contribute to early language acquisition. Specifically, we tested the prediction that depleting cognitive control mechanisms in adults enhances their implicit, auditory word-segmentation abilities. Young adults were exposed to continuous streams of syllables that repeated into hidden novel words while watching a silent film. Afterward, learning was measured in a forced-choice test that contrasted hidden words with nonwords. The participants also had to indicate whether they explicitly recalled the word or not in order to dissociate explicit versus implicit knowledge. We additionally measured electroencephalography during exposure to measure neural entrainment to the repeating words. Engagement of the cognitive mechanisms was manipulated by using two methods. In experiment 1 (n = 36), inhibitory theta-burst stimulation (TBS) was applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or to a control region. In experiment 2 (n = 60), participants performed a dual working-memory task that induced high or low levels of cognitive fatigue. In both experiments, cognitive depletion enhanced word recognition, especially when participants reported low confidence in remembering the words (i.e., when their knowledge was implicit). TBS additionally modulated neural entrainment to the words and syllables. These findings suggest that cognitive depletion improves the acquisition of linguistic knowledge in adults by unlocking implicit statistical learning mechanisms and support the hypothesis that adult language learning is antagonized by higher cognitive mechanisms.
| S-EPMC8764693 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Humans can rapidly and seemingly implicitly learn to predict typical locations of relevant items when those items are encountered in familiar spatial contexts. Two important questions remain, however, concerning this type of learning: (1) which neural structures and mechanisms are involved in acquiring and exploiting such contextual knowledge? (2) Is this type of learning truly implicit and unconscious? We now answer both these questions after closely examining behavior and recording neural activity using MEG while observers (male and female) were acquiring and exploiting statistical regularities. Computational modeling of behavioral data suggested that, after repeated exposures to a spatial context, participants' behavior was marked by an abrupt switch to an exploitation strategy of the learnt regularities. MEG recordings showed that hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (PFC) were involved in the task and furthermore revealed a striking dissociation: only the initial learning phase was associated with hippocampal theta band activity, while the subsequent exploitation phase showed a shift in theta band activity to the PFC. Intriguingly, the behavioral benefit of repeated exposures to certain scenes was inversely related to explicit awareness of such repeats, demonstrating the implicit nature of the expectations acquired. Together, these findings demonstrate that (1a) hippocampus and PFC play complementary roles in the implicit, unconscious learning and exploitation of spatial statistical regularities; (1b) these mechanisms are implemented in the theta frequency band; and (2) contextual knowledge can indeed be acquired unconsciously, and awareness of such knowledge can even interfere with the exploitation thereof.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Human visual perception is determined not just by the light that strikes our eyes, but also strongly by our prior knowledge and expectations. Such expectations, particularly about where to expect certain objects given scene context, might be learned implicitly and unconsciously, although this is hotly debated. Furthermore, it is unknown which brain mechanisms underpin this type of learning. We now show that, indeed, spatial prior expectations can be learned without awareness; in fact, strikingly, awareness seems to hinder the exploitation of the relevant knowledge. Furthermore, we demonstrate that one brain mechanism (hippocampal theta-band activity) is responsible for learning in these settings, whereas another mechanism (prefrontal theta-band activity) is involved in exploiting the learned associations.
| S-EPMC6939492 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The ability of developing complex internal representations of the environment is considered a crucial antecedent to the emergence of humans' higher cognitive functions. Yet it is an open question whether there is any fundamental difference in how humans and other good visual learner species naturally encode aspects of novel visual scenes. Using the same modified visual statistical learning paradigm and multielement stimuli, we investigated how human adults and honey bees (Apis mellifera) encode spontaneously, without dedicated training, various statistical properties of novel visual scenes. We found that, similarly to humans, honey bees automatically develop a complex internal representation of their visual environment that evolves with accumulation of new evidence even without a targeted reinforcement. In particular, with more experience, they shift from being sensitive to statistics of only elemental features of the scenes to relying on co-occurrence frequencies of elements while losing their sensitivity to elemental frequencies, but they never encode automatically the predictivity of elements. In contrast, humans involuntarily develop an internal representation that includes single-element and co-occurrence statistics, as well as information about the predictivity between elements. Importantly, capturing human visual learning results requires a probabilistic chunk-learning model, whereas a simple fragment-based memory-trace model that counts occurrence summary statistics is sufficient to replicate honey bees' learning behavior. Thus, humans' sophisticated encoding of sensory stimuli that provides intrinsic sensitivity to predictive information might be one of the fundamental prerequisites of developing higher cognitive abilities.
| S-EPMC7568273 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The human perceptual system enables us to extract visual properties of an object's material from auditory information. In monkeys, the neural basis underlying such multisensory association develops through experience of exposure to a material; material information could be processed in the posterior inferior temporal cortex, progressively from the high-order visual areas. In humans, however, the development of this neural representation remains poorly understood. Here, we demonstrated for the first time the presence of a mapping of the auditory material property with visual material ("Metal" and "Wood") in the right temporal region in preverbal 4- to 8-month-old infants, using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Furthermore, we found that infants acquired the audio-visual mapping for a property of the "Metal" material later than for the "Wood" material, since infants form the visual property of "Metal" material after approximately 6 months of age. These findings indicate that multisensory processing of material information induces the activation of brain areas related to sound symbolism. Our findings also indicate that the material's familiarity might facilitate the development of multisensory processing during the first year of life.
| S-EPMC6006328 | biostudies-literature
Project description:High-level cortical regions encode motor decisions before or even absent awareness, suggesting that neural processes predetermine behavior before conscious choice. Such early neural encoding challenges popular conceptions of human agency. It also raises fundamental questions for brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that traditionally assume that neural activity reflects the user's conscious intentions. Here, we study the timing of human posterior parietal cortex single-neuron activity recorded from implanted microelectrode arrays relative to the explicit urge to initiate movement. Participants were free to choose when to move, whether to move, and what to move, and they retrospectively reported the time they felt the urge to move. We replicate prior studies by showing that posterior parietal cortex (PPC) neural activity sharply rises hundreds of milliseconds before the reported urge. However, we find that this "preconscious" activity is part of a dynamic neural population response that initiates much earlier, when the participant first chooses to perform the task. Together with details of neural timing, our results suggest that PPC encodes an internal model of the motor planning network that transforms high-level task objectives into appropriate motor behavior. These new data challenge traditional interpretations of early neural activity and offer a more holistic perspective on the interplay between choice, behavior, and their neural underpinnings. Our results have important implications for translating BMIs into more complex real-world environments. We find that early neural dynamics are sufficient to drive BMI movements before the participant intends to initiate movement. Appropriate algorithms ensure that BMI movements align with the subject's awareness of choice.
| S-EPMC9090994 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We investigated the effect of a secondary task on implicit sequence learning in children and young adults. A serial reaction time (SRT) task was administered to 8-to-10 year old children and 18-to-22 year old adults. Participants reacted to the location of a target presented in one of four locations on the screen with a spatially corresponding response key. Unknown to participants, the location at which the target appeared was structured according to a deterministic sequence. Occasionally, the black target dot was replaced by a red target dog. To assess the effect of attentional load on implicit sequence learning, half of the participants of each age group was assigned to the single task condition, while the other half executed the task under dual task conditions. Whereas participants in the single task condition could ignore the change in target identity, dual task participants additionally had to count the number of times the black dot was replaced by a red dog to increase the attentional load. Sequence learning was tested under single task conditions in both conditions. Z-transformed results indicate that young adults generally showed more sequence learning than children. Importantly, the secondary task had no effect on sequence learning in children, since children learned as much under dual task conditions as under single task conditions. Adults, on the other hand, showed a different result pattern, as they displayed more sequence learning under single task than under dual task conditions. We surmise that this result is due to the vainly attempt of adults, but not children, to integrate both sequences.
| S-EPMC4033240 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The majority of current developmental models prioritise a pedagogical approach to knowledge acquisition in infancy, in which infants play a relatively passive role as recipients of information. In view of recent evidence, demonstrating that infants use pointing to express interest and solicit information from adults, we set out to test whether giving the child the leading role in deciding what information to receive leads to better learning. Sixteen-month-olds were introduced to pairs of novel objects and, once they had pointed to an object, were shown a function for either the object they had chosen, or the object they had ignored. Ten minutes later, infants replicated the functions of chosen objects significantly more than those of un-chosen objects, despite having been equally visually attentive during demonstrations on both types of objects. These results show that offering information in response to infants' communicative gestures leads to superior learning (Experiment 1) and that this difference in performance is due to learning being facilitated when infants' pointing was responded to, not hindered when their pointing was ignored (Experiment 2), highlighting the importance of infants' own active engagement in acquiring information.
| S-EPMC4188542 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Implicit skill learning occurs incidentally and without conscious awareness of what is learned. However, the rate and effectiveness of learning may still be affected by decreased availability of central processing resources. Dual-task experiments have generally found impairments in implicit learning, however, these studies have also shown that certain characteristics of the secondary task (e.g., timing) can complicate the interpretation of these results. To avoid this problem, the current experiments used a novel method to impose resource constraints prior to engaging in skill learning. Ego depletion theory states that humans possess a limited store of cognitive resources that, when depleted, results in deficits in self-regulation and cognitive control. In a first experiment, we used a standard ego depletion manipulation prior to performance of the Serial Interception Sequence Learning (SISL) task. Depleted participants exhibited poorer test performance than did non-depleted controls, indicating that reducing available executive resources may adversely affect implicit sequence learning, expression of sequence knowledge, or both. In a second experiment, depletion was administered either prior to or after training. Participants who reported higher levels of depletion before or after training again showed less sequence-specific knowledge on the post-training assessment. However, the results did not allow for clear separation of ego depletion effects on learning versus subsequent sequence-specific performance. These results indicate that performance on an implicitly learned sequence can be impaired by a reduction in executive resources, in spite of learning taking place outside of awareness and without conscious intent.
| S-EPMC4183724 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Binary feedback, providing information solely about task success or failure, can be sufficient to drive motor learning. While binary feedback can induce explicit adjustments in movement strategy, it remains unclear if this type of feedback also induce implicit learning. We examined this question in a center-out reaching task by gradually moving an invisible reward zone away from a visual target to a final rotation of 7.5° or 25° in a between-group design. Participants received binary feedback, indicating if the movement intersected the reward zone. By the end of the training, both groups modified their reach angle by about 95% of the rotation. We quantified implicit learning by measuring performance in a subsequent no-feedback aftereffect phase, in which participants were told to forgo any adopted movement strategies and reach directly to the visual target. The results showed a small, but robust (2-3°) aftereffect in both groups, highlighting that binary feedback elicits implicit learning. Notably, for both groups, reaches to two flanking generalization targets were biased in the same direction as the aftereffect. This pattern is at odds with the hypothesis that implicit learning is a form of use-dependent learning. Rather, the results suggest that binary feedback can be sufficient to recalibrate a sensorimotor map.
| S-EPMC10327077 | biostudies-literature