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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (4 results)

  • Article
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 40 (2018)
While statistical learning (SL) has long been described as alearning mechanism that operates automatically across agesand modalities, there are a growing number of cases in whichstatistical regularities are not learned automatically, and inwhich attention seems to impact learning. We examined therole of attentional instruction on adults’ ability to learn twostatistical patterns simultaneously. Results suggest that evenwithout explicit instruction to attend to either pattern,participants automatically learn both patterns, and thatexplicit instruction to attend to one or both streams improveslearning, but only for the attended stream(s). In addition,when attention is directed at only one stream, the learningbenefit for that stream is coupled with a learning cost for theunattended stream. This adds to our understanding of thenuanced relationship between attention and SL, by suggestingthat when more than one structure is present attentionselectively improves SL of attended information in adults, butat the cost of unattended information.
    Cover page: Attention Selectively Boosts Learning of Statistical Structure
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 41 (2019)
    Learning about novel objects not only involves noticinginformation that makes the object unique, but also what makesobjects the same. Yet, these two levels of learning involvedifferent pieces of information, meaning that learning one wellcould come at the cost of the other. Moreover, children maycategorize in a fundamentally different way, resulting in theselevels of learning interacting differently. To investigate this,we had adults and children perform a categorization taskfollowed by an item recognition test. We found that adultsshowed a trade-off, such that the ability to categorize itemscame at the cost of memory for those items. Using a subset ofmore unique lures, children’s memory trended towards a trade-off with category learning. However, this was only observedamong the older children. This suggests that adults’ efficientlearning comes at a cost, and this trade-off may start to appearin the elementary school years.
      Cover page: A Trade-Off in Learning Across Levels of Abstraction in Adults and Children
      • Thesis
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2010)

      The aim of this research is to better understand why children consistently surpass adults in their ultimate attainment of language--the sensitive period for language acquisition. I propose the Nested Cognitive and Neural Asynchronies theory to explain this phenomenon. This theory first asserts that an expert neural system for language processing is built in a nested manner, with commitments made first to aspects of language that are learned early. Once built, this system--though expert in processing one's native language--is ineffective in processing other languages, particularly those that differ in these early‐learned aspects of language (such as sound structure). Second, asynchronies in the development of neural substrates supporting learning are thought to contribute to sensitive period phenomena. One consequence of the vast differences in the maturation of various substrates important for learning is that children end up with an abundance of implicit learning mechanisms relative to explicit. Since much of language learning is likely to occur via these implicit mechanisms, the result is that children might simply be better built to learn language.

      The experiments reported here support this theory. The first study shows that languages that differ from one's native language in the most basic properties (i.e., sounds) are 1) more difficult to learn and 2) represented with distinct neural circuits. The second study demonstrates that the neural circuits recruited by children for a necessary component of explicit learning change substantially over the course of development, suggesting that the neural circuits deployed for learning in children differ greatly from those in adults. The third study shows that explicit learning can be detrimental for learning certain aspects of language. Moreover, when the primary substrate associated with this learning--the prefrontal cortex--is taken offline, this detriment of explicit learning is ameliorated, thereby showing that child-adult learning differences are related to neural maturation. Together, this collection of studies aims not to catalogue sensitive period phenomena in humans but rather to explain why the sensitive period for language exists.

        Cover page: The sensitive period for language acquisition: The role of age related differences in cognitive and neural function
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 42 (2020)
        Adults parse continuous experience into meaningful events, a process referred to as event segmentation. This segmentationin turn colors how experiences are construed content experienced within an event is held mentally in an accessible state,which is then dropped after an event boundary. However, little is known about whether children are similarly influencedby event boundaries. Here, we tested seven- to nine-year-old childrens and adults recognition of objects experienced eitherwithin or across event boundaries of two cartoons. We found that children and adults were both more accurate and fasterto correctly recognizing objects that last occurred within events than across an event boundary. We, however, additionallyobserved an interaction such that childrens access to recent experience was less influenced by event boundaries than adults.Thus, while the spontaneous segmentation of complex events emerges by middle childhood, event structure less reliablyshapes the active contents of childrens minds than adults.
          Cover page: Events Structure Information Accessibility Less in Children than Adults
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