Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Distributional learning research has established that humanscan track the frequencies of sequentially presented stimuli inorder to infer the probabilities of upcoming events (e.g., Hasher& Zacks, 1984). Here, we set out to explore anticipation of astimulus after implicit distributional learning. We hypothesizethat as people learn the category frequency informationimplicitly, response times will scale according to the relativefrequency of the stimulus category. Twelve adult participantsviewed photographs of faces, tools, and buildings whileperforming a simple classification task. We found that responsetimes significantly decreased with greater frequencies in thedistribution of stimulus categories. This result suggested thatdistributional information about the internal representations ofthe stimuli could be learned and indicated the possibility thatparticipants anticipated the stimuli proportional to theprobability of the category appearing and thereby reducedresponse times for the more frequent categories.