Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.