This coming Monday, Alicia Maciá, from Brain Mechanisms of Language Learning, will be presenting the talk:
Mechanisms of Statistical Learning across Sensory Modalities
Statistical Learning (SL) can be defined as the mechanism by which humans detect environmental statistical regularities and use this information to predict future events, optimizing sensory, motor and cognitive processing. Previous literature has demonstrated that SL acts at unimodal sensory level, extracting the statistical structure of auditory, visual or tactile information. However, although in our daily life we face situations where information of different modalities is involved, most of previous research has provided little evidence showing crossmodal SL (i.e. from one sensory modality to another). Indeed, experiments previously conducted in our lab testing SL with artificial, non-meaningful auditory and visual stimuli, pointed to SL for only unimodal conditions (visual and auditory) when the different modality inputs were randomly shown. Crossmodal SL (audio-visual and vice versa) occured only when the participants could anticipate the modality of the upcoming stimuli (and so more attentional resources were available). These findings led to the question that I will tackle in my Master Thesis: can we observe crossmodal SL if the statistically paired multisensory inputs can be processed semantically regardless their input sensory modality? To test if crossmodal SL can take place when information can be represented, we will replicate previous crossmodal SL paradigms in which meaningless associated crossmodal stimuli could not be learned. We hypothesize that if information can be encoded semantically at supramodal level, SL might proceed regardless the combination of sensory inputs conveying the semantic input.
Location: Online (ZOOM). Click here to join the meeting