B. Smith, L.
The role of the environment in human development is a central theoretical question. Why are human?s the way they are? What is essential in the environment? What are the malleable points in development during which a different environment can lead to a different outcome? What are the mechanisms of change? Sometimes we talk about the environment in ways that it make it hard to answer these big questions, because we conceptualize the environment as having a constant statistical structure. The environment is dynamic, changing as a function of development and learning because the learner plays a direct role in shaping the regularities -the statistical structure - of that environment This talk will consider how the statistical structures of visual learning environments changes with development and learning and the consequences for a theory of statistical learning.