Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions

Training is known to improve our ability to make decisions when interacting in complex environments. However, individuals vary in their ability to learn new tasks and acquire new skills in different settings. Here, we test whether this variability in learning ability relates to individual brain osci...

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Main Authors: Michael, Elizabeth, Covarrubias, Lorena Santamaria, Leong, Victoria, Kourtzi, Zoe
Other Authors: School of Social Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/170610
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1706102023-09-24T15:30:27Z Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions Michael, Elizabeth Covarrubias, Lorena Santamaria Leong, Victoria Kourtzi, Zoe School of Social Sciences Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) Social sciences::Psychology Perceptual Decisions Visual Cortex Training is known to improve our ability to make decisions when interacting in complex environments. However, individuals vary in their ability to learn new tasks and acquire new skills in different settings. Here, we test whether this variability in learning ability relates to individual brain oscillatory states. We use a visual flicker paradigm to entrain individuals at their own brain rhythm (i.e. peak alpha frequency) as measured by resting-state electroencephalography (EEG). We demonstrate that this individual frequency-matched brain entrainment results in faster learning in a visual identification task (i.e. detecting targets embedded in background clutter) compared to entrainment that does not match an individual's alpha frequency. Further, we show that learning is specific to the phase relationship between the entraining flicker and the visual target stimulus. EEG during entrainment showed that individualized alpha entrainment boosts alpha power, induces phase alignment in the pre-stimulus period, and results in shorter latency of early visual evoked potentials, suggesting that brain entrainment facilitates early visual processing to support improved perceptual decisions. These findings suggest that individualized brain entrainment may boost perceptual learning by altering gain control mechanisms in the visual cortex, indicating a key role for individual neural oscillatory states in learning and brain plasticity. Ministry of Education (MOE) Published version This work was supported by grants to: ZK from the Wellcome Trust (205067/Z/16/Z), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (H012508, BB/P021255/1); EM from the Wellcome Trust (206495/Z/17/Z). VL is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (RG152/18) and by a Social Science & Humanities Research Fellowship (MOE2020-SSHR-008). VL and ZK receive funding from the Centre for Lifelong learning and Individualised Cognition (CLIC), which is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied for a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. 2023-09-21T06:32:59Z 2023-09-21T06:32:59Z 2023 Journal Article Michael, E., Covarrubias, L. S., Leong, V. & Kourtzi, Z. (2023). Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions. Cerebral Cortex, 33(9), 5382-5394. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac426 1047-3211 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/170610 10.1093/cercor/bhac426 36352510 2-s2.0-85159248064 9 33 5382 5394 en RG152/18 MOE2020-SSHR-008 Cerebral Cortex © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider NTU Library
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Social sciences::Psychology
Perceptual Decisions
Visual Cortex
spellingShingle Social sciences::Psychology
Perceptual Decisions
Visual Cortex
Michael, Elizabeth
Covarrubias, Lorena Santamaria
Leong, Victoria
Kourtzi, Zoe
Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
description Training is known to improve our ability to make decisions when interacting in complex environments. However, individuals vary in their ability to learn new tasks and acquire new skills in different settings. Here, we test whether this variability in learning ability relates to individual brain oscillatory states. We use a visual flicker paradigm to entrain individuals at their own brain rhythm (i.e. peak alpha frequency) as measured by resting-state electroencephalography (EEG). We demonstrate that this individual frequency-matched brain entrainment results in faster learning in a visual identification task (i.e. detecting targets embedded in background clutter) compared to entrainment that does not match an individual's alpha frequency. Further, we show that learning is specific to the phase relationship between the entraining flicker and the visual target stimulus. EEG during entrainment showed that individualized alpha entrainment boosts alpha power, induces phase alignment in the pre-stimulus period, and results in shorter latency of early visual evoked potentials, suggesting that brain entrainment facilitates early visual processing to support improved perceptual decisions. These findings suggest that individualized brain entrainment may boost perceptual learning by altering gain control mechanisms in the visual cortex, indicating a key role for individual neural oscillatory states in learning and brain plasticity.
author2 School of Social Sciences
author_facet School of Social Sciences
Michael, Elizabeth
Covarrubias, Lorena Santamaria
Leong, Victoria
Kourtzi, Zoe
format Article
author Michael, Elizabeth
Covarrubias, Lorena Santamaria
Leong, Victoria
Kourtzi, Zoe
author_sort Michael, Elizabeth
title Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
title_short Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
title_full Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
title_fullStr Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
title_full_unstemmed Learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
title_sort learning at your brain's rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
publishDate 2023
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/170610
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