Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An adaptive function of the visual system is that it flexibly updates existing representations of objects upon changes.Such updating can also alter the representations of associated objects that are not directly observable. What mechanism supportsthis process? We propose that statistical learning provides a channel through which changes in one object are automaticallytransferred to related objects. Observers viewed a temporal sequence of paired circles. One circle in each pair then changed insize, and observers recalled the size of the other circle. When the first circle enlarged (or shrank), the second circle was judgedto be larger (or smaller), suggesting that the change was automatically transferred to the predicted object (Experiment 1). Thesame, however, was not true if the second circle changed in size (Experiment 2). No observer was explicitly aware of the circlepairs. Thus, statistical learning enables the implicit updating of representations through predictive associations.