Comparing statistical learning across perceptual modalities in infancy: An investigation of underlying learning mechanism(s)

Abstract

Statistical learning (SL), sensitivity to probabilistic regularities in sensory input, has been widely implicated in cognitive and perceptual development. Little is known, however, about the underlying mechanisms of SL and whether they undergo developmental change. One way to approach these questions is to compare SL across perceptual modalities. While a decade of research has compared auditory and visual SL in adults, we present the first direct comparison of visual and auditory SL in infants (8-10 months). Learning was evidenced in both perceptual modalities but with opposite directions of preference: Infants in the auditory condition displayed a novelty preference, while infants in the visual condition showed a familiarity preference.Interpreting these results within the Hunter and Ames model (1988), where familiarity preferences reflect a weaker stage of encoding than novelty preferences, we conclude that there is weaker learning in the visual modality than the auditory modality for this age. In addition, we found evidence of different developmental trajectories across modalities: Auditory SL increased while visual SL did not change for this age range. The results suggest that SL is not an abstract, amodal ability; for the types of stimuli and statistics tested, we find that auditory SL precedes the development of visual SL and is consistent with recent work comparing SL across modalities in older children. K E Y W O R D Sabstract, auditory, domain-generality, infant, statistical learning, visual

Learning Words While Listening to Syllables: Electrophysiological Correlates of Statistical Learning in Children and Adults

“…However, in the group of children, the 2-AFC performance did not differ from chance in any condition. This disparity between children and adults’ results is consistent with recent works showing that aSL with non-linguistic materials, as well as with visual stimuli, improves with age ( Arciuli and Simpson, 2011 ; Bertels et al, 2015 ; Lukács and Kemény, 2015 ; Raviv and Arnon, 2018 ; Shufaniya and Arnon, 2018 ; Emberson et al, 2019 ). Nonetheless, it is important to note that the differences in the 2-AFC performance across groups were made at the expense of the absence of reliable signs of learning in the group of children, hence recommending a more nuanced interpretation of the age-related differences in behavioral SL outcomes.…”

“…For instance, Raviv and Arnon (2018) , using auditory syllables and visual figures in auditory (aSL) and visual (vSL) SL tasks modeled from Saffran et al (1996) , showed that while vSL improved in children aged 5–12 years old, aSL did not. This could account for the disparity of results found in the previous studies showing age differences for vSL (e.g., Arciuli and Simpson, 2011 ; Bertels et al, 2015 ), but not for aSL (e.g., Saffran et al, 1997 ; see however Emberson et al (2019) for SL improvements in both modalities). Nonetheless, in a subsequent work, Shufaniya and Arnon (2018) showed that the absence of age differences in the aSL was not due to the sensory modality per se but rather to the type of stimuli used.…”

Statistical-sequential learning in development

“…Postnatally, the evidence reviewed herein indicates that visual and spatiotemporal sequential learning for co-occurrence frequencies are present at two months (e.g., as in VExP findings and the statistical learning study by Kirkham et al 2002) and older (e.g., by nine months; Emberson, Misyak, Schwade, Christiansen, and Goldstein 2008), with further statistical learning of regularities within visual arrays documented at nine months (Fiser and Aslin, 2002).…”

Measuring children’s auditory statistical learning via serial recall

“…One notable form of learning is statistical learning (SL)the process of using probabilistic co-occurrence to group elements present in the environment. SL is operational in a rudimentary form in neonates (Bulf, Johnson, & Valenza, 2011;Teinonen, Fellman, Näätänen, Alku, & Huotilainen, 2009), is robustly observed across different modalities during the first year of life (Emberson, Misyak, Schwade, Christiansen, & Goldstein, 2019;Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002;Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), and at least in the visual domain continues to develop throughout childhood (Arciuli & Simpson, 2011;Raviv & Arnon, 2018). Studies that report associations between SL and other cognitive skills (e.g., spoken language, reading) suggest that SL could be an important component of human cognition that varies across individuals (e.g., Arciuli & Simpson, 2011;Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010;Frost, Armstrong, & Christiansen, 2019).…”