From Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Brain Mechanisms of Language Learning Group
will present the talk titled
Crossmodal statistical learning is modulated by attentional focus
Abstract
Statistical learning (SL) is the human ability to extract statistical regularities from the environment. Given the extensive evidence of regularity extraction within but not between sensory modalities, it has been hypothesized that SL is a modality-specific mechanism (Frost et al., 2015). The current study follows up on this question by investigating whether SL can take place between visual (V) and auditory (A) abstract stimuli. Participants were exposed to a stream of visual fractals and synthetic sounds while performing an oddball detection task. Stimuli were grouped into either unimodal (AA, VV) or crossmodal pairs (VA, AV). The only cue to identify a pair was a higher transitional probability between the elements. We found that when the unimodal and crossmodal pairs were randomly intermixed within blocks, the participants only learned (implicitly) the unimodal pairs. However, when the pairs were presented in separated unimodal and crossmodal blocks, facilitating attentional orienting across modalities, the participants could learn the crossmodal pairs. Our results demonstrate that SL is not a modality-specific mechanism and suggest that a correct attention deployment is crucial to learn crossmodal transitional probabilities.
Location: Online (Skype for Business)
Meeting link: https://meet.lync.com/ubarcelona-ub/mdeosdad/MAZZHU49