Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans readily extract statistical regularities from perceptual experience (e.g. a cook noticing which ingredients often appear together). How does such learning guide peoples' performance on procedural tasks (e.g. preparing various dishes)? Here we examine what shortcuts people propose to help them to complete assembly problems more efficiently by eliminating repeated subroutines. Participants (N=301) repeatedly assembled tangram-like shapes, and could create composite tiles for future use. Some participants assembled a sequence of tangrams where certain pairs of tiles recurred consistently (Highly structured); the remaining assembled tangrams with less predictable tile arrangements (Less structured). Participants exposed to Highly structured sequences created tiles that tracked the frequency with which those tile pairs recurred across tangrams, and doing so was accompanied by greater efficiency in assembly. Taken together, these findings suggest that statistical learning guides not only pattern recognition, but also the prospective creation of shortcuts for procedural tasks.