BEHAVIOURAL CORRELATES OF VISUAL STATISTICAL LEARNING

01/29/2020

Szabolcs Sáringer¹, Péter Kaposvári¹

¹ Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Szeged, Szeged

It has been shown that the brain during exploration automatically highlights the regularities from the environment. The implicit process when a new information is built into the internal representation of the world we have, is called statistical learning. This phenomenon lets the sensory system make predictions therefore our perception becomes more efficient. Several factors can modify the learning, either aiding or impeding it. The separate investigation of these components leads us to understand the basic process. One of these factors can be motor learning, when the motor pattern is overlapping with the present regularity. In a series of visual experiments we observed the process of statistical learning while the effect of motor learning was gradually decreased. In the conditions where the motor pattern is present, it results in robust learning. When the process could rely only on the transitional probabilities without the support of motor information, we still found learning effect. Although this effect is weaker, with this experimental design we are able to continuously monitor the process of statistical learning. Our result shows that after very few expositions of the regularity we can not only learn the new information but it has immediate effect on our behaviour.