Neural correlates of statistical learning in the inferior-temporal cortex of rhesus monkeys.

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Neural correlates of statistical learning in the inferior-temporal cortex of rhesus monkeys. Peter Kaposvari1*, Susheel Kumar1 and Rufin Vogels1 1 KU Leuven, Laboratorium Neuro - en Psychofysiologie, Belgium We learn to implicitly extract the statistical regularities in the environment around us, e.g. sequences of stimuli that follow each other (e.g. letters in specific words). In the visual domain, human observers can extract regular sequences of visual stimuli from a continuous stream of visual shapes. The neural correlates of such visual sequence learning are still unclear. Here, we determined whether a neural correlate of short sequences of visual images, presented in a continuous stream, is present in macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex. Two monkeys passively fixated while a continuous stream of 3 fixed sequences of 5 grayscale images of animals of various species each were presented in a random order. After a passive exposure of two months, we assessed whether the responses of IT neurons showed a correlate of the sequences by introducing deviant stimuli in the fixed standard sets. We compared the multiunit neuronal responses for the deviant stimuli with identical stimuli when presented in the standard, learned sequence. We observed a significant enhancement of the responses to the deviant stimulus and the trailing standard stimuli, when the deviant was either from the same sequence (p <0.05 for each monkey) or from the other two sequences (p <0.05 for each monkey). The neuronal responses to a second deviant stimulus (which followed the first deviant in the standard set) did not differ significantly from the standard. These results demonstrate that monkey IT cortex encodes at least part of a learned temporal sequence in which a stimulus is presented. Acknowledgements This work was supported by Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen (G.0582.12N), Interuniversitaire Attractiepool, Programma Financiering (PF 10/008), European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement number PITN-GA-2008-290011 and Odysseus grant (G.007.12N). Keywords: sequence learning, statistical learning, rhesus macaque, Inferotemporal cortex, single-unit Conference: 11th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience, Mons, Belgium, 22 May - 22 May, 2015. Presentation Type: Poster presentation Topic: Neuroscience Citation: Kaposvari P, Kumar S and Vogels R (2015). Neural correlates of statistical learning in the inferior-temporal cortex of rhesus monkeys.. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: 11th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2015.89.00063 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 30 Apr 2015; Published Online: 05 May 2015. * Correspondence: PhD. Peter Kaposvari, KU Leuven, Laboratorium Neuro - en Psychofysiologie, Leuven, 3000, Belgium, Peter.Kaposvari@med.kuleuven.be Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Peter Kaposvari Susheel Kumar Rufin Vogels Google Peter Kaposvari Susheel Kumar Rufin Vogels Google Scholar Peter Kaposvari Susheel Kumar Rufin Vogels PubMed Peter Kaposvari Susheel Kumar Rufin Vogels Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.