Hippocampal and cortical contributions to statistical learning

The human brain is adept at extracting regularities from our environment, allowing us to behave adaptively and make predictions. Research on the neural basis of this statistical learning has diverged in recent years based on the brain mechanism being investigated and the timing and modality of the regularities. One literature has focused on the entrainment of neural oscillations to rapid auditory sequences in cortical regions. The other literature has focused on changes in the similarity of neural representations for slower visual sequences in the hippocampus. By reuniting these literatures, we identify a potential role for the hippocampus in generalizing over temporal variability and suggest how hippocampal-cortical interactions could support statistical learning.