Multisensory Statistical Learning: Modality General or Specific?
Author:
Gwen Radecki ’25Co-Authors:
Faculty Mentor(s):
Aaron Mitchel, Department of PsychologyFunding Source:
Emerging ScholarsAbstract
Statistical learning (henceforth SL) is the unconscious acquisition of structured information from environmental inputs. For example, we can extract word boundaries from the frequency of syllable transitions. SL is a multisensory phenomenon, having been demonstrated in multiple modalities and stimulus domains. However, it remains to be seen whether SL is supported by independent modality-specific mechanisms (i.e. a separate mechanism for vision, hearing, and touch) or a singular modality-general mechanism. In the present study, we test these models by manipulating the rate of presentation for auditory and visual SL. If the mechanism is modality-general, the rate of presentation should not affect learning and performance will be similar across modalities. If the mechanisms are modality-specific, the rate of presentation should affect learning: subjects should learn auditory sequences better at faster presentation rates and visual sequences at slower rates. Preliminary results suggest that auditory and visual sequences are learned most effectively at different rates of presentation, providing evidence of a ‘modality constraint’ on SL. This suggests that multisensory SL may be supported by modality-specific mechanisms, though further research and data collection are required