Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Statistical Learning (SL), the ability to extract probabilistic information from the environment, is a subject of much debate.It appears intuitive that such a profound mechanism of learning should carry predictive power towards general cognitiveability. Yet, previous attempts have struggled to link SL ability to measures of general cognitive function, suffering fromlow correlations and mediocre test-retest reliability. Here, we deploy a new continuous auditory SL task that achieves hightest-retest reliability ( r = .8) and shows that SL ability does significantly correlate with general cognitive function (up tor =. 56). Results are discussed in light of i) the theoretical implications of the high test-retest reliability of our novel SLtask, ii) SL ability as a marker of general cognitive function, and iii) future methodological considerations.