Abstract/Summary

Concept learning is a lifelong process that starts at the very early days of our lives. An intact concept learning requires extracting and associating the commonalities and distinctions between the set of experiences, events, objects, and facts happening around us in a meaningful way. Extracted commonalities, and semantic features, are used in organizing the information into categorized representations in the brain. In order to encode and store the newly acquired knowledge efficiently, the human brain supports a wealth of cognitive abilities; comprehension, categorization, association, binding, and memory all require establishing new neural pathways across the distinct sensory-motor, memory, and association areas. The human brain is a plastic organ and shows rapid adaptation to changing dynamics and cognitive demands. The brain always seeks to reach a computationally optimum organizational structure to establish efficient information transactions. The efficiency supports the rapid encoding and maintenance of the newly acquired knowledge and accompanying skills across diverse regions of the brain. In this study, by combining the high spatio-temporal power of multimodal imaging, we aimed to capture the fast-changing dynamics of the brain towards an efficient state with learning a set of novel concepts. Benefiting from the high spatio-temporal strength of the EEG and fMRI, we investigated the reorganization of the brain dynamics both at the functional and cortico-electrical levels. By establishing the whole-brain level time-varying connectivity elicited to the online and incidental concept learning, we aimed to investigate the evolution of the brain networks towards an efficient state as the successful acquisition and encoding of the concept knowledge is achieved.