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Changes in statistical learning across development

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Abstract

Statistical learning enables learners to extract the environmental regularities necessary to piece together the structure of their worlds. The capacity for statistical learning and its properties are likely to change across development from infancy to adulthood. Acknowledging this developmental change has broad implications for understanding the cognitive architecture of statistical learning and why children excel in certain learning situations relative to adults. In this Review, we first synthesize empirical work on the development of statistical learning, which indicates that it improves with development only for certain forms of input. Taking inspiration from related cognitive and neural findings, we then consider developmental changes in the properties of statistical learning. Infants and young children might have a broader and less-directed curriculum for learning and represent the outcomes of learning differently from older children and adults. This synthesis offers insight into how developmental changes in statistical learning from infancy through adulthood might fundamentally alter how children interact with, learn about, and remember their experiences.

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Fig. 1: Statistical learning in the real world.
Fig. 2: Statistical learning paradigms.
Fig. 3: Neural underpinnings of statistical learning.
Fig. 4: The development of attention and implicit learning processes.
Fig. 5: Greater forgetting can lead to more general representations.
Fig. 6: How statistical representations can change across development.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank all members of the Learning and Neural Development, Budding Minds, and Duncan laboratories at the University of Toronto for continued helpful discussion and support. They also thank C. Hudson Kam for feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Tess Allegra Forest, Margaret L. Schlichting, Katherine D. Duncan & Amy S. Finn

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A.S.F. and T.A.F. researched data for the article. A.S.F. and T.A.F. contributed substantially to discussion of the content. All authors wrote the article. All authors reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission.

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Forest, T.A., Schlichting, M.L., Duncan, K.D. et al. Changes in statistical learning across development. Nat Rev Psychol 2, 205–219 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00157-0

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