Statistical Learning Impairments as a Consequence of Stroke

Abstract

Statistical learning is the implicit learning of the contingencies between sequential stimuli, typically from mere exposure. It is present from infancy onward, and plays a role in functions from language learning to selective attention. Despite these observations, there are few data on whether statistical learning capacity changes with age or after brain injury. In order to examine how brain injury affects the ability to learn and update statistical representations, we had young control and healthy elder participants, as well as participants with either left or right brain injury, perform an auditory statistical learning task. Participants listened to two languages with made-up words that were defined by the transition probability between syllables. Following passive listening, learning was assessed with a two-alternative forced choice test for the most familiar word. As in previous studies, we found that young controls have a learning capacity limitation for statistical learning; a second language is less well learned than the first, and this statistical learning capacity limit is attenuated with age. Additionally, we found that brain damaged patients, whether with left or right hemispheric damage, showed impaired statistical learning. This impairment was not explained by aphasia or cognitive deficits. As statistical learning is a critical skill for daily life, a better appreciation of the nature of this impairment will improve our understanding of the cognitive effects of brain injury and could lead to new rehabilitation strategies.

Neuroprotective effect of dimethyl fumarate on cognitive impairment induced by ischemic stroke

“…Some studies have shown that oxidative damage could cause neuronal cells death, leading to PSCI (38,39), which may explain our conclusion. Previous studies have reported that age may be an independent risk factor for PSCI (40)(41)(42). In our study, the univariate analysis results showed age was a possible risk factor for PSCI, but the multivariate logistic regression analysis results suggested no significant association between age and PSCI.…”

Not All Words Are Equally Acquired: Transitional Probabilities and Instructions Affect the Electrophysiological Correlates of Statistical Learning

“…For this experiment, two syllabaries (syllabary A and syllabary B) with 16 unique auditory CV syllables each (e.g., “tu,” “ci,” “da,” “mi,” “ge,” “do’ from syllabary A; and “ga,” “pa,” “be,” “me,” “gu,” “pi” from syllabary B) were created to generate the nonsense words to be used in the implicit and explicit versions of the SL task. Note that, because we used a within-subject design, using syllables coming from two different artificial languages (i.e., without any syllable overlap, although vowels were necessarily repeated across syllabaries) was mandatory to minimize interference effects of the first language over the second language, as observed in other studies (e.g., Gebhart et al, 2009 ; Franco et al, 2011 ; Shaqiri et al, 2018 ). Syllables were produced and recorded by a native speaker of European Portuguese with a duration of 300 ms each.…”

Statistical learning in epilepsy: Behavioral and anatomical mechanisms in the human brain

“…34,35 Our findings may thus be consistent with a previous report of impairments in auditory SL in a cohort of patients with multilobar brain damage from stroke. 36 In addition, patients with uncontrolled seizures had seizure types that were predominantly (90%) bilateral tonic-clonic or focal impaired-awareness (Table S4), potentially indicating more pronounced global dysfunction. Although there have been conflicting results on the relationship between seizure frequency and declarative memory, [37][38][39][40] we did not find the same relationship between seizure control and EM.…”