Abstract
Knowing when the brain learns is crucial for both the comprehension of memory formation and consolidation and for developing new training and neurorehabilitation strategies in healthy and patient populations. Recently, a rapid form of offline learning developing during short rest periods has been shown to account for most of procedural learning, leading to the hypothesis that the brain mainly learns during rest between practice periods. Nonetheless, procedural learning has several subcomponents not disentangled in previous studies investigating learning dynamics, such as acquiring the statistical regularities of the task, or else the high-order rules that regulate its organization. Here we analyzed 506 behavioral sessions of implicit visuomotor deterministic and probabilistic sequence learning tasks, allowing the distinction between general skill learning, statistical learning, and high-order rule learning. Our results show that the temporal dynamics of apparently simultaneous learning processes differ. While high-order rule learning is acquired offline, statistical learning is evidenced online. These findings open new avenues on the short-scale temporal dynamics of learning and memory consolidation and reveal a fundamental distinction between statistical and high-order rule learning, the former benefiting from online evidence accumulation and the latter requiring short rest periods for rapid consolidation.
Highlights
Learning is the ability to acquire knowledge or skills through new or repeated experiences
The short-scale dynamic of learning, and in particular, whether the new skill can be learned during practice or short rest periods, has only recently started to be investigated8–10
Our results revealed that the short-scale dynamics of different types of learning are mirroring each other, building up either during practice or during the following rest periods
Summary
Learning is the ability to acquire knowledge or skills through new or repeated experiences. A seminal experience consists of measuring the speed and accuracy with which participants play a sequence—a simplified version of learning a piece of piano without the artistic component—before and after practicing it several times1 This type of research revealed that following a training session and during a resting or sleep period, the acquisition of new skill may continue to develop, a process called offline learning. Performance or the stability of the memories against interference (e.g., caused by the learning of a second sequence) is enhanced several hours after the end of the practice compared to just after the practice This offline learning, which occurs during awake or sleep periods, has been linked to functional brain changes. This ability is present in babies and at the core of a wide range of behaviors, including linguistic processing or perceptual decision making
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