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Poster presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Kansas City, KS.
Modality Constrained Statistical Learning of Spatial, Spatiotemporal, and Temporal Input
Christopher M. Conway & Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
Vision appears to process input best when the input is spatially
rather than temporally distributed, whereas audition is the opposite
(Mahar, Mackenzie, & McNicol, 1994). Here we explored whether such
modality constraints also affect statistical learning. Participants
were exposed to statistically-governed visual input
sequences--distributed spatially, spatiotemporally, or temporally--and
then tested on their ability to appropriately classify novel
sequences. At moderate presentation rates (4 elements per second),
there was little difference across the three conditions. However, at
faster presentation rates (8 elements per second), performance
declined such that it was worst with temporal and best with spatial
input. Additionally, in an auditory (temporal) version of the
experiment, run at both presentation rates, performance was better
than in any of the visual conditions. These results suggest that
statistical learning processes are affected by modality constraints:
vision is biased toward processing spatial input whereas audition is
biased toward temporal input.
