Brain signatures of a multiscale process of sequence learning in humans
Open Access
- 4 February 2019
- journal article
- research article
- Published by eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd in eLife
Abstract
Extracting the temporal structure of sequences of events is crucial for perception, decision-making, and language processing. Here, we investigate the mechanisms by which the brain acquires knowledge of sequences and the possibility that successive brain responses reflect the progressive extraction of sequence statistics at different timescales. We measured brain activity using magnetoencephalography in humans exposed to auditory sequences with various statistical regularities, and we modeled this activity as theoretical surprise levels using several learning models. Successive brain waves related to different types of statistical inferences. Early post-stimulus brain waves denoted a sensitivity to a simple statistic, the frequency of items estimated over a long timescale (habituation). Mid-latency and late brain waves conformed qualitatively and quantitatively to the computational properties of a more complex inference: the learning of recent transition probabilities. Our findings thus support the existence of multiple computational systems for sequence processing involving statistical inferences at multiple scales.Keywords
Funding Information
- Fondation Bettencourt Schueller ("Frontières du Vivant" doctoral fellowship)
- Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Innovation ("Frontières du Vivant" doctoral fellowship)
- Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale
- Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives
- Collège de France
- European Research Council (Grant NeuroSyntax)
- European Union Seventh Framework Programme (604102 - Human Brain Project)
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