Statistical Learning in Stroke

The group has just had an article published in Frontiers on Statistical Learning Impairments as a Consequence of Stroke. The original goal of the research was to assess whether people with right hemisphere strokes might have more trouble updating a statistical model of language than participants with left hemisphere damage. Along the way things got more interesting and murkier. We ended up running many variants and including older and younger controls. So there are a lot of data, and they are available for you to look at too.

In summary, the main findings are: 1. Young adults have a capacity limit for learning statistically defined languages. 2. This capacity limit was attenuated for older controls. 3. Participants with stroke, left or right, usually had significant deficits learning this material despite intact language comprehension, functioning well in their home environments, and being a relatively long time from the stroke itself. 4. No clear location was associated with the magnitude of the deficit, but the strongest (though non-significant) association was near the anterior insula/superior temporal gyrus.

In addition, the work benefited from the work of an undergraduate (at the time), and a former PhD student so it was a pleasant spanning of academic generations, and utilized materials provided by Dr. Richard Aslin so it was also a tribute to collegiality and collaboration.

Please feel free to send on any of your comments or critiques.