Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Dev Sci. 2021 Sep;24(5):e13072. doi: 10.1111/desc.13072. Epub 2021 Jan 3.
Statistical learning allows us to discover myriad structures in our environment, which is saturated with information at many different levels-from items to categories. How do children learn different levels of information-about regularities that pertain to items and the categories they come from-and how does this differ from adults? Studies on category learning and memory have suggested that children may be more focused on items than adults. If this is also the case for statistical learning, children may not extract and learn the multi-level regularities that adults can. We report three experiments showing that children and adults extract both item- and category-level regularities in statistical learning. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that both children and adults can learn structure at the item and category levels when they are measured independently. In Experiment 3, we show that both children and adults learn about categories even when exposure does not require this: both are able to generalize their learning from the item to the category level. Results indicate that statistical learning operates across multi-level structure in children and adults alike, enabling generalization of learning from specific items to exemplars from categories of those items that observers have never seen. Even though children may be more focused on items during other forms of learning, they learn about categories from item-level input during statistical learning.
统计学习使我们能够发现环境中的无数结构，这些结构在许多不同的层次上都充满了信息——从项目到类别。孩子们如何学习不同层次的信息——关于与项目和它们来自的类别相关的规律，以及这与成年人有何不同？关于类别学习和记忆的研究表明，与成年人相比，孩子们可能更关注项目。如果这也适用于统计学习，那么孩子们可能无法像成年人那样提取和学习多层次的规律。我们报告了三项实验，表明儿童和成人在统计学习中都可以提取项目和类别层次的规律。在实验 1 和 2 中，我们表明，当分别测量时，儿童和成人都可以在项目和类别层次上学习结构。在实验 3 中，我们表明，即使在不需要的情况下，儿童和成人都可以学习类别：他们都能够将从项目到类别水平的学习进行泛化。结果表明，统计学习在儿童和成人中都可以跨多层次结构进行，从而能够将从特定项目到观察者从未见过的这些项目的类别中的示例的学习进行泛化。尽管在其他形式的学习中，儿童可能更关注项目，但在统计学习中，他们也可以从项目层次的输入中学习类别。
