Forest, T. A. , Finn*, A. & Schlichting*, M.
University of Toronto, Department of Psychology
Despite ample work suggesting that learning about structure in our environment involves extracting transitional probabilities (TP) between items, we still do not know precisely what is stored in memory as a result of statistical learning. Importantly, there are a variety of other statistics beyond TP that could be extracted, including 1) order-independent information about item groupings or 2) which position in a group an item inhabits. Moreover, brain regions that underlie memory for these varied statistics have different developmental trajectories, suggesting that statistical learning may result in different memory representations over development. Here, we answer two major open questions: What aspects of statistical input are represented in memory? and How does this vary with development? Following visual statistical learning, adults and children (4-9yo) completed a recognition memory test. We show that across ages, representations included TP and order-independent information about group membership. Preliminary comparisons suggest that children rely more heavily than adults on order-independent grouping information. This highlights that combining across events to extract higher-order knowledge-a key function of memory-is also at play during statistical learning. In addition, the representations stored as a result of statistical learning may be fundamentally different across ages.