François, C. 1, 2, 3 , Peñaloza, C. . 1 , Moris, J. 1, 3 , Tillmann, B. 4 & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. 1, 3, 5
1 Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group, Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona), Barcelona, Spain,
2 Attention, Perception and Acquisition of Language Lab, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, Barcelona, Spain
3 Department of Basic Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
4 Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Auditory Cognition and Psychoacoustics Team, CNRS, UMR 5292, INSERM, Unité 1028, University Lyon 1, Lyon
5 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, ICREA, Barcelona, Spain
Recent implicit electrophysiological data obtained for the auditory modality suggest similar brain dynamics for the segmentation of sequences of tones and syllables. Behavioural experiments based on explicit measures have revealed that infants and adults can segment statistically organized auditory and visual sequences via a domain-general statistical mechanism. Here we examined the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying explicit and implicit statistical learning in the visual modality. Our study combined behavioural, event-related potentials and an exposure phase task with a cover story to maintain the level of attention. Participants performed a visual statistical learning task in two sessions differing in the type of listening instructions for the exposure phase. In the first session, no explicit instructions were given to the participants but implicit ERP measures of on-line statistical violations were collected. In the second session, participants were explicitly asked to learn new statistically organized visual sequences while we recorded EEG and finally tested them with a recognition task. Preliminary behavioural results of the second session showed that participants were able to explicitly recognize the sequences of shapes. Preliminary ERP data collected during the exposure phases revealed that while late components were modulated with explicit instructions, early components were modulated with implicit instructions.