Duncan Dock H, van Moorselaar Dirk, Theeuwes Jan
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Institute Brain and Behavior Amsterdam (iBBA), Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Jun;32(3):1240-1253. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02605-1. Epub 2024 Nov 4.
Statistical learning is a person's ability to automatically learn environmental regularities through passive exposure. Since the earliest studies of statistical learning in infants, it has been debated exactly how "passive" this learning can be (i.e., whether attention is needed for learning to occur). In Experiment 1 of the current study, participants performed a serial feature search task where they searched for a target shape among heterogenous nontarget shapes. Unbeknownst to the participants, one of these nontarget shapes was presented much more often in location. Even though the regularity concerned a nonsalient, nontarget item that did not receive any attentional priority during search, participants still learned its regularity (responding faster when it was presented at this high-probability location). While this may suggest that not much, if any, attention is needed for learning to occur, follow-up experiments showed that if an attentional strategy (i.e., color subset search or exogenous cueing) effectively prevents attention from being directed to this critical regularity, incidental learning is no longer observed. We conclude that some degree of attention to a regularity is needed for visual statistical learning to occur.
统计学习是指个体通过被动接触自动学习环境规律的能力。自最早对婴儿统计学习的研究以来，关于这种学习究竟有多“被动”（即学习发生时是否需要注意力）一直存在争议。在本研究的实验1中，参与者执行了一项序列特征搜索任务，他们在异质的非目标形状中搜索目标形状。参与者并不知道，这些非目标形状中的一个在位置上出现的频率要高得多。尽管这种规律涉及到一个在搜索过程中没有得到任何注意力优先对待的不突出的非目标项目，但参与者仍然学会了它的规律（当它出现在这个高概率位置时反应更快）。虽然这可能表明学习发生时不需要太多注意力（如果需要的话），但后续实验表明，如果一种注意力策略（即颜色子集搜索或外部提示）有效地阻止注意力指向这个关键规律，就不再会观察到附带学习。我们得出结论，视觉统计学习的发生需要对规律有一定程度的注意力。
