Recently, new findings demonstrated that most procedural learning is evidenced during short breaks within a learning session, and not during the practice itself. This result raised the exciting hypothesis that the brain mainly learns during breaks. The aim of this project is to identify the type of learning that need resting periods to develop, among visuomotor, statistical and higher-order learning using online behavioral experiments. A neural candidate to explain this learning during rest is neural replay, where the brain is replaying silently and at a faster scale the neural activity just played during the practice. The intern will also have access to brain activity recorded with magnetoencephalography to test this hypothesis of fast neural replay during rest periods. This work will potentially identify crucial neural operations during learning and reveal fundamental distinction between different types of learning.
This internship will be co-supervised by Romain Quentin (http://romainquentin.fr)