Shufaniya, A. 1 & Arnon, I. 2
1 Hebrew University
2 Hebrew University
Statistical learning refers to humans? ability to extract recurring patterns from their environment and utilize them in learning. Seen as a kind of implicit learning, this ability is often assumed to be fully developed in infancy and not change much with age. However, there is growing evidence for age-related improvements in statistical and implicit learning. A recent study found that visual SL improved with age during childhood (ages 5-12) whereas auditory SL did not, suggesting that the developmental trajectory of SL is modality-sensitive. However, the auditory task in that study used linguistic stimuli (syllables), while the visual task was non-linguistic (pictures), giving rise to the possibility that the differential effect of age was driven by stimulus type (linguistic vs. non-linguistic) rather than modality. We address this question by conducting a similarly designed large-scale study on children?s visual and auditory SL performance (ages 5-12 years), but using non-linguistic auditory stimuli (familiar sounds) instead of linguistic ones. Unlike previous findings, our results show a similar effect of age in both modalities, with both visual and auditory SL improving with age. These findings suggest that SL is stimuli-sensitive, and that both modality-based differences and the trajectory of SL may be stimuli-dependent.