Online abstraction during statistical learning revealed by neural entrainment from intracranial recordings

Abstract We encounter the same people, places, and objects in predictable sequences and configurations. These regularities are learned efficiently by humans via statistical learning. Importantly, statistical learning creates knowledge not only of specific regularities, but also of more abstract, generalizable regularities. However, prior evidence of such abstract learning comes from post-learning behavioral tests, leaving open the question of whether abstraction occurs online during initial exposure. We address this question by measuring neural entrainment during statistical learning with intracranial recordings. Neurosurgical patients viewed a stream of scene photographs with regularities at one of two levels: In the Exemplar-level Structured condition, the same photographs appeared repeatedly in pairs. In the Category-level Structured condition, the photographs were trial-unique but their categories were paired across repetitions. In a baseline Random condition, the same photographs repeated but in a scrambled order. We measured entrainment at the frequency of individual photographs, which was expected in all conditions, but critically also at half of that frequency — the rate at which to-be-learned pairs appeared in the two structured conditions (but not the random condition). Neural entrainment to both exemplar and category pairs emerged within minutes throughout visual cortex and in frontal and temporal brain regions. Many electrode contacts were sensitive to only one level of structure, but a significant number encoded both exemplar and category regularities. These findings suggest that abstraction occurs spontaneously during statistical learning, providing insight into the brain’s unsupervised mechanisms for building flexible and robust knowledge that generalizes across input variation and conceptual hierarchies.