Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, 108 Wolf Hall, Newark, DE, 19716, USA.
University of Nevada, Reno, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Oct;25(5):1847-1854. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1405-6.
Visual statistical learning (VSL), the unsupervised learning of statistical contingencies across time and space, may play a key role in efficient and predictive encoding of the perceptual world. How VSL capabilities vary as a function of ongoing task demands is still poorly understood. VSL is modulated by selective attention and faces interference from some secondary tasks, but there is little evidence that the types of contingencies learned in VSL are sensitive to task demands. We found a powerful effect of task on what is learned in VSL. Participants first completed a visual familiarization task requiring judgments of face gender (female/male) or scene location (interior/exterior). Statistical regularities were embedded between stimulus pairs. During a surprise recognition phase, participants showed less recognition for pairs that had required a change in response key (e.g., female followed by male) or task (e.g., female followed by indoor) during familiarization. When familiarization required detection of "flicker" or "jiggle" events unrelated to image content, there was weaker, but uniform, VSL across pair types. These results suggest that simple task manipulations play a strong role in modulating the distribution of learning over different pair combinations. Such variations may arise from task and response conflict or because the manner in which images are processed is altered.
视觉统计学习（VSL），即跨时间和空间的统计关联的无监督学习，可能在感知世界的高效和预测性编码中发挥关键作用。VSL 能力如何随正在进行的任务需求而变化，目前仍知之甚少。VSL 受到选择性注意的调节，并且会受到一些次要任务的干扰，但几乎没有证据表明 VSL 中学习的关联类型对任务需求敏感。我们发现任务对 VSL 中学习的内容有强大的影响。参与者首先完成一项视觉熟悉任务，要求判断面孔的性别（女性/男性）或场景的位置（室内/室外）。在刺激对之间嵌入了统计规律。在惊喜识别阶段，参与者对熟悉过程中需要改变响应键（例如，女性后接男性）或任务（例如，女性后接室内）的对的识别能力下降。当熟悉过程需要检测与图像内容无关的“闪烁”或“抖动”事件时，不同对类型的 VSL 较弱，但均匀。这些结果表明，简单的任务操作在调节学习在不同对组合中的分布方面起着重要作用。这种变化可能是由于任务和响应冲突引起的，或者是因为处理图像的方式发生了改变。
