University of Houston

The goal of this study is to arrive at an understanding of strategy formulation in the human brain. Given a complex visuomotor task, we take a two pronged approach to understanding and isolating moments of insight and learning. We analyze EEG and motor activity to capture milestones in the process of Œlearning‚.

By applying the process of coherence analysis to EEG recordings, rich visualizations have been developed that provide spatiotemporal evidence of changes in synchronous brain activity.  We combine this evidence with performance on the visuomotor task over a number of trials in order to correlate changes in brain activity with success on the task. This approach enables us to capture leaps made in the process of learning and understand the neural correlates of strategy formulation.

Subjects who move from a significantly low level of performance to a high level performance exhibit long range gamma synchronies that not present in other bands. These synchronies, in the high frequency band, demonstrate cooperation between occipital and frontal brain regions. This profile was not found for subjects with small variations in level of performance.