What drives individual differences in statistical learning? The role of perceptual fluency and familiarity
Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual differences on SL tasks reflect. Here we present experimental work suggesting that at least some individual differences arise from variation in perceptual fluency — the ability to rapidly or efficiently code and remember the stimuli that statistical learning occurs over. We show that performance on a standard SL task varies substantially within the same (visual) modality as a function of whether the stimuli involved are familiar or not, independent of stimulus complexity. Moreover, we find that test-retest correlations of performance in a statistical learning task using stimuli of the same level of familiarity (but distinct items) are stronger than correlations across the same task with different levels of familiarity. Finally, we demonstrate that statistical learning performance is predicted by an independent measure of stimulus-specific perceptual fluency which contains no statistical learning component at all. Our results suggest that a key component of SL performance may be unrelated to either domain-specific statistical learning skills or modality-specific perceptual processing.