The Alien Language Game: The Developmental Trajectory of Auditory and Visual Statistical Learning
Author:
Gwen Radecki ’25Co-Authors:
Faculty Mentor(s):
Aaron Mitchel, PsychologyHaley Kragness, Psychology
Funding Source:
Gary & Sandy Sojka Fund for Research, Teaching & Scholarship on Developmental Disabilities & Human Health FundAbstract
Statistical learning (SL) extends across multiple stimulus domains and modalities, including vision, audition, and touch. However, it remains to be seen whether SL is supported by a modality-general or modality-specific mechanism(s). Prior work examined this by varying the rate of presentation across modalities, finding evidence of modality-specific constraints on learning (Emberson, Conway & Christiansen, 2011). In a prior experiment, I extended this work by testing the effect of presentation rate in standardized audio and visual SL tasks. The results of this project provided evidence against modality constraints to SL, suggesting instead that the mechanism is modality-general in nature. However, SL’s developmental trajectories in school age children are highly debated and minimally researched, begging the question of whether modality constraints on statistical learning exist at any point during development. Utilizing a gamified version of the task used in my prior experiment, I was able to examine the mechanism’s performance in the visual and auditory domains at two rates of presentation in children 7- to 12- years-old. Performance in the auditory domain was significantly better than that of the visual domain, with performance in visual task at both rates of presentation at or below chance, suggesting the SL mechanism is better equipped to track temporal dependencies of auditory stimuli. However, performance at the slower rate of presentation in both the auditory and visual domaines improved with age. Thus, my results may provide evidence suggesting that modality constraints to statistical learning do not exist in school age children.