Minier, L. , Fagot, J. & Rey, A.
CNRS & Aix-Marseille University, France
Extracting the regularities of our environment is one of our core cognitive abilities. To study the fine-grained dynamics of regularity extraction, we used a method combining the advantages of the artificial language paradigm (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996) and the serial response time task (Nissen & Bullemer, 1987). After series of random trials, monkeys (Guinea baboons, Papio papio) and humans were exposed to language-like patterns composed of regular sequences of ABC elements. In monkeys and humans, we found that the extraction of BC patterns was faster than the extraction of AB patterns. This result suggests that there is a learning advantage for the final elements BC of regular sequences ABC that benefits from the contextual information provided by previous elements. We also found that humans, and not monkeys, were able to extract more complex regularities by likely using their language recoding abilities.