Abstract
Visual statistical learning (VSL) was traditionally tested through offline two-alternative forced choice (2-AFC) questions. More recently, online reaction time (RT) measures and alternative offline question types have been developed to further investigate learning during exposure and more adequately assess individual differences in adults (Siegelman et al., 2017b, 2018). We assessed the usefulness of these measures for investigating VSL in early-school-aged children. Secondarily, we examined the effect of introducing a cover task, potentially affecting attention, on children’s VSL performance. Fifty-three children (aged 5–8 years) performed a self-paced VSL task containing triplets, in which participants determine the presentation speed and RTs to each stimulus are recorded. Half of the participants performed a cover task, while the other half did not. Online sensitivity to the statistical structure was measured by contrasting RTs to unpredictable versus predictable elements. Subsequently, participants completed 2-AFC (choose correct triplet) and 3-AFC (fill blank to complete triplet) offline questions. RTs were significantly longer for unpredictable than predictable elements, so we conclude that early-school-aged children are sensitive to the statistical structure during exposure, and that the RT task can measure that. We found no evidence as to whether children can perform above chance on offline 2-AFC or 3-AFC questions, or whether the cover task affects children’s VSL performance. These results show the feasibility of using an online RT task when assessing VSL in early-school-aged children. This task therefore seems suitable for future studies that aim to investigate VSL across development or in clinical populations, perhaps together with behavioral tasks.
Highlights
Research into statistical learning (SL) has shown that infants, adults, and children are able to detect statistical structure in sequences of stimuli in the world around them (e.g., Saffran et al, 1996; Fiser and Aslin, 2002; Arciuli and Simpson, 2011, 2012)
Since we found no effects of time on our online reaction time (RT) measure, the individual RT measure of learning was calculated using the normalized RTs to all stimuli presented during the experiment [normalized RT Element 1 –]
The results show that the two offline accuracy measures correlate significantly with one another [r = 0.274, t(51) = 2.031, p-value = 0.048], and neither of the offline accuracy measures correlate significantly with the online RT measure [2-AFC: r = 0.188, t(51) = 1.367, p-value = 0.178; 3-AFC: r = 0.157, t(51) = 1.139, p-value = 0.26]
Summary
Research into statistical learning (SL) has shown that infants, adults, and children are able to detect statistical structure in sequences of stimuli in the world around them (e.g., Saffran et al, 1996; Fiser and Aslin, 2002; Arciuli and Simpson, 2011, 2012). In the typical SL paradigm, as originally employed by Saffran et al (1996), participants are exposed to a continuous stream of visual or auditory stimuli (the familiarization phase). It is crucial that during the familiarization phase, participants are not instructed to learn or memorize the input: they either listen passively or perform a cover task that is unrelated to the statistical regularities presented to them (e.g., Arciuli and Simpson, 2011). Under these task conditions, it is assumed that the learning process is implicit
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