INTRODUCTION: Human learning and adaptation rely on neuroplastic processes, the brain's intrinsic capacity to reorganise in response to experience. Understanding the temporal dynamics of these processes has far-reaching implications for neuroscience, psychology, or rehabilitative medicine.

AIM(S): To understand the dynamic nature of functional neuroplasticity using by multiple repeated measures and a comparative control group.

METHOD(S): The LEARNING BRAIN study investigated the neural mechanisms of experience-dependent plasticity resulting from different training paradigms: intensive musical training (N=24), tactile Braille learning (N=17), and a control group undergoing standard university curriculum (N=19). Over one year, the participants underwent domain-general and domain-specific functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks across 6–7 time points and behavioural assessments at 3 time points. This sampling paradigm enabled the characterisation of non-linear trajectories in neural adaptation.

RESULTS: Tactile Braille learners showed rapid recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus for a Lexical Decision Task after just one week of training, whereas activation in the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) emerged after six weeks. In the musical training group, the left and right sensorimotor cortices showed parallel changes for a piano playing task within the first three months of training, and diverged afterwards.

CONCLUSIONS: These results show distinct, dynamic training- and task-specific patterns of brain reorganisation. To facilitate further discovery, we have released the complete preprocessed fMRI and behavioural dataset, including 6 fMRI tasks and 2 cognitive behavioural tasks, via OpenNeuro (https://openneuro.org/datasets/ds007022). The LEARNING BRAIN dataset offers opportunities for multimodal analyses of the relationship between sensory experience, cognitive performance, and neural plasticity, as well as for methodological development in longitudinal and cross-modal neuroimaging research.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT: This project was funded by the National Science Centre grant 2018/30/E/HS6/00206.