Static statistical regularities in the placement of targets and salient distractors within the search display can be learned and used to optimize attentional guidance. Whether statistical learning also extends to dynamic regularities governing the placement of targets and distractors on successive trials has been less investigated. Here, we applied the same dynamic cross-trial regularity...
Speech perception studies have highlighted: i) auditory-articulatory mapping processes; ii) Categorical Perception (CP) (Liberman et al., 1967); iii) bottom-up formation of phonological categories through statistical learning; iv) top-down mechanisms shaping the perceptual space (Kuhl et al., 1992). Among several open questions, we focus on: i) the relation between speech perception features...
Statistical learning has been widely proposed in the literature as a fundamental mechanism underlying language acquisition. In this direction, statistical word form learning protocols have been used across different developmental stages, showing that even 11 month infants perform above chance. Specifically, this behavioral task consists of two phases. A learning phase, where participants...
Organisms pick up on stimulus statistics along multiple perceptual dimensions. These statistics can be accumulated quickly, sensitively, and passively, and can even influence behavior in unrelated tasks. In the auditory domain, there is a great deal of evidence that listeners build up statistically-driven expectations of what they will hear. Despite such strong empirical demonstrations of...
One of the most prominent theories in cognitive neuroscience states that brains are foretelling machines. In other words, in contrast to the classic view of the brain as a passive stimulus-response machine, it constantly generates predictions about future events. This is achieved through a generative process of inference based on the statistical regularities of the environment. Βy continuously...
The question how we perceive the world as continuous has been largely debated in neuroscience. Indeed, in every-day life, we constantly interact with the external environment by scanning it through eye movements. Saccadic eye movements are the major example of an abrupt change in visual perception caused by self-movements. While it is clear that self-movements challenge perceptual stability by...
