UC Berkeley

How do learning experiences shape our brain and cognitive skills? While there has been extensive evidence showing that learning experiences do have an impact on cognitive performance across the lifespan, we are still understanding how those changes take place. My dissertation work has sought to characterize the mechanisms that underlie improved performance resulting from different learning experiences. In Chapter 1, the general introduction, I present relevant background literature to provide a context for the rest of the chapters in my dissertation. In Chapter 2, I provide an overview of the type of changes to the functional connectivity of brain networks that result from sensory, motor, and cognitive learning experiences. The evidence from that body of work leads us to conclude that learning changes the way brain networks interact, such that BOLD fluctuations within the network engaged in the learning experience become more tightly synchronized at rest. Having established evidence for experience-dependent brain plasticity, we turn our attention to Chapter 3, where I examine the cognitive impact of broad learning experiences across five decades of life. I present findings suggesting that education has a greater influence on performance on assessments that measure more complex skills, like reasoning. Educational attainment also modulates ages of peak cognitive functioning, while it has little bearing on novel learning. Given that Chapter 2 and 3 provide evidence of the impact of learning on the brain and behavior, we then probe mechanisms of change. In Chapter 4, we present unified findings from a broad literature to explain how various eyetracking measures provide a relatively simple method to characterize cognitive mechanisms that support change as a result of maturation, which can be applied to study changes that occur as a result of learning. Using this eyetracking methodology, in Chapter 5 and 6, I provide empirical evidence about the mechanisms that support improvements in reasoning performance resulting from a real-world learning experience. We find that the young adults became more proficient at encoding, maintaining, and integrating visual relations after only a relatively short learning experience that emphasized reasoning about verbal relations and rules. Collectively, my dissertation work provides mechanistic insights about how learning experiences shape higher-level cognition.