Speaker
Description
Learning is the fundamental backbone of social creatures. In humans, learning is the essential ability to take advantage of what others have already experienced. Here, we want to evaluate the presence of learning during pregnancy and the maintenance of it after birth in postnatal life. Exploiting EEG neural entrainment, we want to evaluate the presence of a brain preference for a learned melody in contrast to the unlearned one.
40 young adults were divided into two experimental groups. They listened once a day for a month to one of two different melodies (melody A vs melody B). After the training, participants underwent an EEG experiment in which they listened, in a randomized order, the two melodies. An encoding model measured the degree of synchronization between brain activity and the continuous auditory input of the learned and unlearned melody. We contrasted the neural tracking of the learned versus the non-learned melody in both group (i.e. Group A trained on melody A and group B trained on melody B), employing a permutation cluster based test. Crucially, the pattern showed by the data is reversed, when group A is evaluated, the TRF for the melody A (i.e. the learned one) is greater than TRF for the melody B (Pclust<0.05); crucially, when group B is evaluated we found an opposite pattern (Pclust<0.05).
Our results in adults indicate that our protocol is valid to test the presence of fetal learning. The following steps will consist of finishing the data collection in newborns.
| If you're submitting a symposium talk, what's the symposium title? | The ontogenetic necessity to extract information from the auditory environment |
|---|---|
| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | Yes |
