Forest, T. A. 1 , Siegelman, N. 2 & Finn, A. S. 1
1 University of Toronto, Department of Psychology, Toronto, ON
2 Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT
Previous studies have shown that the statistical structure of an environment affects how learners allocate their attention: infants attend to medium levels of structure over highly predictable or unpredictable input and adults attend to regular over irregular sequences. While these results imply that learners' attention allocation is impacted by input predictability, no study has directly examined how attention to differently structured input shifts as a function of our experience with that input. Here, we had adults (n=75) complete a visual statistical learning experiment in which streams of information were presented simultaneously in four locations, in four levels of predictability: (1) random, (2) low predictability, (3) medium predictability, and (4) full predictability. Intermittent search trials allowed us to measure where participants attended over the course of the experiment by indexing reaction time on search trials in each location. Our results show that as the experiment progressed, participants shifted from attending to the medium predictability stream (in line with results from infant literature) to attending to locations with lower levels of regularity (low predictability and random streams). This provides the first demonstration that as adults assimilate to an environment's structure, they gradually shift their attention to less predictable sources of information.