Statistical Learning of Target Location Probability in Children and Adults

Learning environmental regularities allows us to make predictions and guide behavior. Growing evidence of location probability learning (LPL) has shown that the statistical regularity of target locations affects spatial attention allocation. However, past studies on LPL have mostly focused on adults’ learning. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of this learning, we investigated the effect of target location probability on 5- to 9-year-old children’s visual search in comparison with that of adults. Both children and adults responded faster when the target appeared in the high probability “rich” quadrant than in the low probability “sparse” quadrants of the search space. This attentional bias toward the rich quadrant persisted even when the target was equally likely to appear in all four quadrants. Importantly, the magnitude of the bias was constant across various ages of participants and did not depend on individual differences in executive functions. Taken together, these results provide novel and converging evidence that implicit statistical learning of target locations occurs early in development and remains stable until early adulthood, which is a distinct developmental pattern from explicit goal-driven spatial attention learning.