The research project targets the ability to extract regularities from sensory input to account for the variance in a range of cognitive skills, across different developmental stages. The project will examine the learning of statistical regularities through ecologically valid settings, and over different time scales. By studying both the extraction and long-term retention of regularities in different domains (e.g., reading, visual search, music) the project will result in a novel set of premises for defining, understanding, and measuring the sub-components of statistical learning, their inter-relations, their relation with other constructs in the learning literature such as implicit learning and reward learning, and their relevance to different aspects of real-life cognition.

The project is interdisciplinary, bringing together complementary evidence from behavioral experimentation, physiological measures, and developmental studies.