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Poster C82 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Greater sensitivity of hippocampus and striatum to visual statistical learning in adults compared to children
Pradyumna Lanka1, Wei Tang2, Zhenghan Qi1; 1Northeastern University, 2Indiana University Bloomington
Statistical learning is the ability to learn statistical patterns in the environment. While statistical learning in the visual domain improves over development, the role of the implicit and explicit memory systems centered on the striatum and hippocampus is unclear. Using multivoxel pattern analysis, we investigated the functional role of the striatum and hippocampus in visual statistical learning. We trained multiple linear support vector machine classifiers to discriminate between deterministic/structured and non-deterministic/random triplets in the presented visual stimuli across the two brain structures for both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. Our results indicate distinct spatial patterns for structured and random triplets in adults (ages 18–24 years) across both the hippocampus and striatum, with similar performance across linguistic and non-linguistic domains. However, children (ages 6–12 years) do not show distinct spatial patterns across structured and random triplets for these two structures. These findings suggest that the hippocampus and striatum are less sensitive to temporal statistical regularities in visual stimuli in children than in adults, providing insights into the functional roles of the two memory systems in visual statistical learning over development.
Keywords: Statistical learning functional magnetic resonance imaging Multivoxel pattern analysis memory systems