Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined mechanisms underlying infants’ ability to detect, extract, and generalize sequential patterns, focusing on how saliency and consistency of distributional information guide infant learning of the most “likely” pattern in audiovisual sequences. In Experiment 1, we asked if 11- and 14-month-old infants could learn a “repetition anywhere” rule (e.g., ABBC, AABC, ABCC). In Experiment 2 we asked if 11- and 14-month-olds could generalize a “medial repetition” rule when its position is consistent in sequence, and in Experiment 3 we asked if 11-month-olds could identify a nonadjacent dependency occurring at edge positions. Infants were first habituated to 4-item sequences (shapes + syllables) containing repetition- and/or position-based structure, and were then tested with “familiar” structure instantiated across new items or combinations of items vs. “novel” (random) sequences. We found that 11-month-olds failed to learn the repetition rule both when the structure appeared in initial, medial, or final position (Experiment 1) and when it was restricted to the medial position (Experiment 2). Fourteen- month-olds learned repetition rules under both conditions. Finally, in Experiment 3 11-month-olds succeeded in learning a nonadjacent dependency in sequences identical to those used to test repetition learning in Experiment 2. Our results suggest that infants at 11 months, like adults, are relatively insensitive to patterns in the middle of sequences.