Investigating children’s consolidation of different types of statistical input and their relations to executive function development – a longitudinal study

Through statistical learning (SL), children implicitly extract repeated patterns in their environment. The developmental trajectory of how previously learned statistical information impacts children’s subsequent learning is poorly understood. Furthermore, how SL contributes to other developmental processes, like executive function, has received surprisingly little attention. In an accelerated longitudinal design, we assessed 187 5-12-year-olds’ (42.8%= female, 84.6%= White) SL and executive function capacities over 16 months. Cue-based SL and retention of nonadjacent probabilistic sequences was age-invariant. However, whilst all age groups showed an increased sensitivity to deterministic sequences with each successive timepoint, 5-6-year-olds demonstrated a greater longitudinal increase in sensitivity than older children. This finding suggests enhanced abilities to apply previously learned deterministic sequences to novel scenarios. Regarding SL-executive function links, greater sensitivity to adjacent conditional regularities at Time 2 predicted executive function increases between Times 2-3 for 8-9-year-olds, though this effect was weak and absent in younger and older groups. Whilst further work is needed to explore SL-executive function links across other modalities, our results suggest that early visual SL capacities may not be a primary driver of executive function change during middle childhood.