Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition (in press)
Modality-Constrained Statistical Learning of Tactile, Visual,
and Auditory
Sequences.
Christopher M. Conway
Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
The authors investigated the extent to which touch, vision, and
audition mediate the processing of statistical regularities within
sequential input. Few researchers have conducted rigorous comparisons
across sensory modalities; in particular, the sense of touch has been
virtually ignored. The current data reveal not only commonalities but
also modality constraints affecting statistical learning across the
senses. Specifically, the authors found that the auditory modality
displayed a quantitative learning advantage compared with vision and
touch. In addition, they discovered qualitative learning biases among
the senses: Primarily, audition afforded better learning for the final
part of input sequences. These findings are discussed in terms of
whether statistical learning is likely to consist of a single, unitary
mechanism or multiple, modality-constrained ones. Click to request a copy of this paper.
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