Reconsidering Visual Statistical Learning: Effects of Attention, Assessment, and Associability

Improving the ease of learning has been a centuries-long pursuit. One tantalizing possibility is that there may be conditions under which learning occurs “automatically” and implicitly. Such a learning process would have profound impacts on pedagogy and our understanding of human development. This type of learning process has, ostensibly, been studied as “statistical learning” over the past 25 years. In this thesis, I propose that although genuine forms of automatic and implicit learning do exist, the standard paradigm for studying visual statistical learning, in adults, does not isolate an automatic and implicit learning process. Additionally, I show that some of the evidence for implicit visual statistical learning, which appeared to be strong, is in fact the result of experimental confounds in response time measures. Finally, I show that stimulus choice significantly affects visual statistical learning, suggesting links with traditionally studied associative learning. I motivate this proposal with an overview of the field of statistical learning and what distinguishes it from other forms of learning (Chapter 1). I support this proposal with evidence from four sets of experiments which investigate the: effects of automaticity and attention (Chapter 2), indirect assessment of visual statistical learning (Chapter 3), and the associability of arbitrary stimuli (Chapter 4). I conclude with a summary of our findings and how they integrate into the broader study of learning processes, along with open questions for future investigation (Chapter 5). To preview our four major findings, we find that: (1) when participants attend to stimulus motion, increasing the amount of exposure does not improve learning of visual sequence regularities, (2) the attentional state of participants significantly affects how well they learn statistical regularities, (3) important evidence in the literature for an implicit statistical learning process – response time facilitation within learned sequences – actually appears to arise from a methodological confound, and (4) stimulus associability is affected by stimulus choice, with faces associated more rapidly than arbitrary fractals. Collectively, these data suggest a reconsideration of visual statistical learning from an automatic, implicit learning process to a more attention-dependent and volitional learning process