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Using magnetoencephalography frequency-tagged responses to identify brain markers of visual statistical learning in typically developing school-aged children

par Fourdin, Lauréline ;Wens, Vincent ;Van Dijck, Oriane;Capparini, Chiara ;De Tiege, Xavier ;Bertels, Julie
Référence BAPS (21-22/05/2026: Gand)
Publication Non publié, 2026-05-22

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Résumé :

Statistical learning (SL) is typically assessed using post-exposure behavioral tasks administered after learning has occurred. Frequency-tagging approaches instead provide online neural indices of learning, have been applied from infancy to adulthood in the auditory domain, and recently to visual SL (VSL) in infancy. Whether this approach captures VSL in school-aged children, and whether these online neural measures relate to offline behavioral measures of VSL at that age, remains unexplored. Participants aged 8-12 years (n=31) viewed a statistical stream of nine alien characters presented at 3.6 Hz and organized into fixed triplets (1.2 Hz) during magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. A Rapid Serial Visual Presentation and a 3-alternative forced choice (3AFC) tasks were then administered to assess VSL.Robust steady-state evoked potentials at the stimulus rate confirmed stimulus-driven visual processing throughout the task. Critically, a significant neural response also emerged at the triplet frequency over occipital regions, indicating that children's brains tracked the higher-order statistical structure of the stream. While behavioral data indicated triplet learning, preliminary analyses did not evidence any brain-behavior correlations, suggesting that these measures capture partially dissociable aspects of the learning process.These findings demonstrate that MEG-based frequency tagging can capture online VSL in school-aged children, offering a promising tool for studying SL in developing populations.