Mareschal, D. & Mareschal, D.
Birkbeck University of London
We present two experiments demonstrating that 5-month-olds are sensitive to the complexity of visual-temporal sequences. In Experiment 1 infants saw two separate sequences of looming coloured shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transition probabilities. One sequence was random while the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior exposure, infants spontaneously preferred the random sequence. In Experiment 2 5-month-olds did not discriminate bigrams from trigrams. An information theoretic analysis revealed that in both experiments disengagement from the sequences was governed by short-term redundancy and not by long-term statistical learning. This finding offers a more parsimonious explanation of some infant statistical learning results and underscores the centrality of complexity in early cognition, and offers a cautionary note for studies comparing looking times to sequences of with differing statistical structure embedded within them