Effects Of Statistical Learning Research Articles

Effects of statistical learning in passive and active contexts on reproduction and recognition of auditory sequences.

Statistical learning plays an important role in acquiring the structure of cultural communication signals such as speech and music, which are both perceived and reproduced. However, statistical learning is typically investigated through passive exposure to structured signals, followed by offline explicit recognition tasks assessing the degree of learning. Such experimental approaches fail to capture statistical learning as it takes place and require post hoc conscious reflection on what is thought to be an implicit process of knowledge acquisition. To better understand the process of statistical learning in active contexts while addressing these shortcomings, we introduce a novel, processing-based measure of statistical learning based on the position of errors in sequence reproduction. Across five experiments, we employed this new technique to assess statistical learning using artificial pure-tone or environmental-sound languages with controlled statistical properties in passive exposure, active reproduction, and explicit recognition tasks. The new error position measure provided a robust, online indicator of statistical learning during reproduction, with little carryover from prior statistical learning via passive exposure and no correlation with recognition-based estimates of statistical learning. Error position effects extended consistently across auditory domains, including sequences of pure tones and environmental sounds. Whereas recall performance showed significant variability across experiments, and little evidence of being improved by statistical learning, the error position effect was highly consistent for all participant groups, including musicians and nonmusicians. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding psychological mechanisms underlying statistical learning and compare the evidence provided by different experimental measures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Distractor filtering is affected by local and global distractor probability, emerges very rapidly but is resistant to extinction

Effects of statistical learning (SL) of distractor location have been shown to persist when the probabilities of distractor occurrence are equalized across different locations in a so-called extinction phase. Here, we asked whether lingering effects of SL are still observed when a true extinction phase, during which the distractor is completely omitted, is implemented. The results showed that, once established, the effects of SL of distractor location do survive the true extinction phase, indicating that the pattern of suppression in the saliency map is encoded in a form of long-lasting memory. Quite unexpectedly, we also found that the amount of filtering implemented at a given location is not only dictated by the specific rate of distractor occurrence at that location, as previously found, but also by the global distractor probability. We therefore suggest that the visual attention system could be more or less (implicitly) prone to suppression as a function of how often the distractor is encountered overall, and that this suppressive bias affects the degree of suppression at the specific distractor-probability location. Finally, our results showed that the effects of SL of distractor location can appear much more rapidly than has been previously documented, requiring a few trials to become manifest. Hence, SL of distractor location appears to have an asymmetrical rate of learning during acquisition and extinction, while the amount of suppression exerted at a specific distractor location is modulated by distractor contextual probabilistic information.

Preverbal Infants Discover Statistical Word Patterns at Similar Rates as Adults: Evidence From Neural Entrainment

The discovery of words in continuous speech is one of the first challenges faced by infants during language acquisition. This process is partially facilitated by statistical learning, the ability to discover and encode relevant patterns in the environment. Here, we used an electroencephalogram (EEG) index of neural entrainment to track 6-month-olds’ (N = 25) segmentation of words from continuous speech. Infants’ neural entrainment to embedded words increased logarithmically over the learning period, consistent with a perceptual shift from isolated syllables to wordlike units. Moreover, infants’ neural entrainment during learning predicted postlearning behavioral measures of word discrimination (n = 18). Finally, the logarithmic increase in entrainment to words was comparable in infants and adults, suggesting that infants and adults follow similar learning trajectories when tracking probability information among speech sounds. Statistical-learning effects in infants and adults may reflect overlapping neural mechanisms, which emerge early in life and are maintained throughout the life span.

Auditory Statistical Learning During Concurrent Physical Exercise and the Tolerance for Pitch, Tempo, and Rhythm Changes.

Previous studies suggest that statistical learning is preserved when acoustic changes are made to auditory sequences. However, statistical learning effects can vary with and without concurrent exercise. The present study examined how concurrent physical exercise influences auditory statistical learning when acoustical and temporal changes are made to auditory sequences. Participants were presented with the 500-tone sequences based on a Markov chain while cycling or resting in ignored and attended conditions. Learning effects were evaluated using a familiarity test with four types of short tone series: tone series in which stimuli were same as 500-tone sequence and three tone series in which frequencies, tempo, or rhythm was changed. We suggested that, regardless of attention, concurrent exercise interferes with tolerance in statistical learning for rhythm, rather than tempo changes. There may be specific relationships among statistical learning, rhythm perception, and motor system underlying physical exercise.

Effects of statistical learning on the acquisition of grammatical categories through Qur’anic memorization: A natural experiment

Empirical evidence for statistical learning comes from artificial language tasks, but it is unclear how these effects scale up outside of the lab. The current study turns to a real-world test case of statistical learning where native English speakers encounter the syntactic regularities of Arabic through memorization of the Qur’an. This unique input provides extended exposure to the complexity of a natural language, with minimal semantic cues. Memorizers were asked to distinguish unfamiliar nouns and verbs based on their co-occurrence with familiar pronouns in an Arabic language sample. Their performance was compared to that of classroom learners who had explicit knowledge of pronoun meanings and grammatical functions. Grammatical judgments were more accurate in memorizers compared to non-memorizers. No effects of classroom experience were found. These results demonstrate that real-world exposure to the statistical properties of a natural language facilitates the acquisition of grammatical categories.

Statistical learning effects in musicians and non-musicians: An MEG study

This study aimed to assess the effect of musical training in statistical learning of tone sequences using Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Specifically, MEG recordings were used to investigate the neural and functional correlates of the pre-attentive ability for detection of deviance, from a statistically learned tone sequence. The effect of long-term musical training in this ability is investigated by means of comparison of MMN in musicians to non-musicians.Both groups (musicians and non-musicians) showed a mismatch negativity (MMN) response to the deviants and this response did not differ amongst them neither in amplitude nor in latency. Another interesting finding of this study is that both groups revealed a significant difference between the standards and the deviants in the response of P50 and this difference was significantly larger in the group of musicians. The increase of this difference in the group of musicians underlies that intensive, specialized and long term exercise can enhance the ability of the auditory cortex to discriminate new auditory events from previously learned ones according to transitional probabilities. A behavioral discrimination task between the standard and the deviant sequences followed the MEG measurement. The behavioral results indicated that the detection of deviance was not explicitly learned by either group, probably due to the lack of attentional resources. These findings provide valuable insights on the functional architecture of statistical learning.