Event Related Potential of Skill Learning in Unimpaired Participants: Replication and Extension of Findings

The present study sought to replicate and extend previous findings (Romero et al. 2008; Khazen 2019) using Electroencephalopathy (EEG) for assessing neural plasticity associated with the changes in cognition during the acquisition of a novel skill. These previous studies only looked at changes in EEG for pre/post-practice recordings. The present study utilized 3 electroencephalopathy recording sessions (instead of just pre and post practice) on the first, fourth, and last days of six consecutive days of practice with an alphabet addition task. In this task, participants were presented equations following a letter+number=letter format and instructed to indicate whether the candidate answer was true or false (e.g., M+1=N, true; A+3=F, false). One third of the problems presented in all sessions were randomly probed in order to gauge which cognitive strategy was being used (i.e., memory retrieval, counting up in the alphabet, or other). In replication of the previous findings, faster reaction times coupled with increased accuracy are expected to occur in conjunction with strategy probe data trends. This indicates a practice related change in cognitive strategy from counting up in the alphabet to automatic retrieval of the correct answer from memory. Along with the behavioral replications, a reduction in a positive potential ERP peak at ~300ms with practice is also expected along with an increase in the positive peak at ~500ms with practice, especially for old problems presented with true answers. The third intermediate recording session in the present study will also allow for extension of the previous findings by enabling a time domain analysis based on the linearity of the neural plasticity findings from the original studies.