{"pk":28065,"title":"Inferences about Uniqueness in Statistical Learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The mind adeptly registers statistical regularities inexperience, often incidentally. We use a visual statisticallearning paradigm to study incidental learning of predictiverelations among animated events. We ask what kinds ofstatistics participants automatically compute, even whentracking such statistics is task-irrelevant and largely implicit.We find that participants are sensitive to a quantity governingassociative learning, DP, independently of conditionalprobabilities and chunk frequencies, as previously considered.DP specifically reflects the uniqueness, as well as strength, ofconditional probabilities; we find that uniqueness is equallyaffected by a single strong alternative predictor as by severalweak predictors. Performance is well captured with anadapted version of the Rescorla-Wagner delta learning rule(Rescorla & Wagner, 1972). We conclude that incidentalpredictive learning is governed by considerations ofuniqueness, and that this is computed by normalizingconditional probabilities by events’ base-rates. This opens thepossibility of common mechanisms between statisticallearning, associative learning, and causal inference.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"statistical learning; associative learning"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bh0f7w8","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Anna","middle_name":"","last_name":"Leshinskaya","name_suffix":"","institution":"UPenn","department":""},{"first_name":"Sharon","middle_name":"L","last_name":"Thompson-Schill","name_suffix":"","institution":"UPenn","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28065/galley/17704/download/"}]}