Alien Game: Learning Patterns from the Environment

In recent months, many children and their parents participated in the “Alien Game” at the lab- a study examining how children and adults can learn a new language or a sequence of images in just two minutes. Here are some preliminary findings:

 

Infants, children, and adults are constantly exposed to a wide variety of recurring patterns in their environment, and they are able to learn these patterns effortlessly. The ability to detect patterns in the environment and generalize them forms the foundation for learning across many domains, including language, cognition, social behavior and more.

 

​The learning mechanism that allows us to track frequencies, correlations, and conditional probabilities (the likelihood that if A occurs, B will also occur) in our environment is called statistical learning. It refers to our general capacity to extract patterns from various types of input- visual, auditory, or behavioural- automatically and without conscious effort, even after relatively brief exposure. 

 

Statistical learning is present even in infants just a few months old and has been demonstrated across a wide range of tasks. But despite extensive research, many questions about its role in child development remain unanswered: How does statistical learning relate to other cognitive abilities, such as memory and attention? How do individual differences manifest in children and adults? Is the ability to detect recurring patterns stable, or does it change over the course of development? Does it operate similarly across different modalities, such as sounds versus images? And to what extent is it influenced by genetic factors? Additionally, it remains unclear how individual differences in statistical learning relate to language skills and linguistic abilities. The current study examines the links between various developmental factors in children and their statistical learning abilities.

 

So, what did we find?

First, there were no differences in statistical learning abilities between boys and girls or between monolingual and bilingual children. However, performance was strongly linked to age: older children were better at detecting patterns in the “Alien Game.”

 

Although statistical learning is considered a general cognitive learning mechanism, there was no correlation across different sensory tasks: children who excelled at learning the sequence of aliens were not necessarily better at learning the “alien language.” Overall, visual learning tended to be stronger than auditory learning.

 

Another key finding was the considerable individual variation among children: at the individual level, only about 1/3 of participants achieved very high levels of pattern recognition. A follow-up study involving pairs of twins will explore the potential link between genetic factors and advanced statistical learning abilities.