The prevalence and importance of statistical learning in human cognition and behavior
Introduction
Although each day brings new experiences, our world does not present us with a series of novelties. Rather, our experience is highly repetitive and structured. Over the past two decades, a subfield of cognitive science has emerged on how humans acquire this information about the world via statistical learning. This research has highlighted that infants, children, adults — and in some cases non-human animals — possess the remarkable ability to detect and represent regularities from the environment in an unsupervised fashion, often without awareness. In this review, we first highlight recent findings demonstrating not only that humans have the capacity for statistical learning, but also that these learned regularities are relevant for behavior throughout the lifespan — from acquiring language to forming predictions about upcoming experiences. We then propose that these mechanisms have behavioral consequences, from facilitating cognitive processing, to shaping representations, to enabling integration over past experiences. Finally, we end by motivating future investigations of statistical learning based on an emerging understanding of its neural foundations, focusing on its reliance on the hippocampus, a brain structure conventionally implicated in episodic memory and spatial navigation.
Section snippets
Mechanisms of statistical learning
Statistical learning is a rapid, efficient means of extracting regularities from the environment. To this end, it has often been studied in the context of development, a period when it is particularly adaptive to quickly learn about the world. However, statistical learning continues to operate and play an important role in cognition throughout the lifespan in adults. Here we review these two bodies of research on statistical learning.
Behavioral consequences of statistical learning
The adaptive purpose of statistical learning in infancy is readily apparent — for learning about the structure of an unknown world. What are the consequences and benefits for adults? One possibility is that adults are robust statistical learners as a vestige of its importance in development. Alternatively, statistical learning may continue to play an important functional role throughout adulthood. Here, we highlight some of these adaptive benefits.
Behavioral implications of statistical learning in the brain
Exploring how statistical learning influences and interacts with other cognitive systems, such as attention, memory, and decision-making, helps to reveal its broad and adaptive role in behavior. However, these studies employ a wide variety of tasks and stimuli, raising the possibility that there are multiple forms of statistical learning. Here we ask whether our understanding of how statistical learning operates in the brain can be used to make novel behavioral predictions and better
Conclusions and future directions
Throughout this paper, we have explored the pervasive role of statistical learning in human cognition and behavior. We ended with the suggestion, based on a theory of the hippocampus, that one such role of statistical learning may be to influence how and when episodic memories are formed. This approach of generating novel behavioral predictions from an improved neural understanding holds additional promise because statistical learning has been linked to several brain regions beyond the
Conflict of interest statement
Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (R01 MH069456) to NTB and the National Science Foundation (GRFP) to BES.
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