Sucevic, J. 1 , Althaus, N. 2 & Plunkett, K. 1
1 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK
2 School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, UK
The present study explored visual statistical category learning in infants and adults. It aimed to identify whether similar mechanisms underlie the formation of statistical categories across development. Using an implicit unsupervised learning task infant and adults were exposed to a sequence of novel objects which required the extraction of statistical regularities for category formation.
A standard familiarisation-novelty preference procedure was used with infants (N=26 10-month-olds). The feature covariations of the novel objects allowed the items to be organised into categories. Adults (N=25) were exposed to the same set of objects, and were required to make 1-back same/different judgements about consequently presented objects. Reaction time measures were used to assess category formation.
The results revealed that, both in infants and adults, increasing exposure to exemplars led to successful categorisation and easier between-category discrimination judgements as compared to within-category judgements (infants: t(24)=2.91, p<0.05; adults: GCA, p=0.04). Taken together, these results suggest that infants and adults engage similar processes of organising visual items into categories based on statistical regularities. This study provides a first step towards assessing the extent to which the mechanisms underlying visual statistical category learning are shared in infancy and adulthood.