Modality constrained statistical learning of tactile, visual, and auditory sequences.
Chris Conway
Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
We investigated the extent to which touch, vision, and audition mediate the processing of statistical regularities within sequential input. While previous research has examined statistical/sequential learning in the visual and auditory domains, few researchers have conducted rigorous comparisons across sensory modalities; in particular, the sense of touch has been virtually ignored. Our data reveal commonalities between the ways in which these three modalities afford the learning of sequential information. However, the data also suggest that in terms of sequential learning, audition is superior to the other two senses. We discuss these findings in terms of whether statistical/sequential learning is likely to consist of a single, unitary mechanism or multiple, modality-constrained ones.
