Infants Segment Continuous Events Using Transitional Probabilities

2014/04/19 by Aimee E Stahl, Aimee E. Stahl, Alexa R. Romberg +5 · 105 citations
Health Professions · Mathematics · Psychology · #Artificial intelligence #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognitive psychology #Communication #Computer science #Developmental psychology #Event (particle physics) #Infant Health and Development #Language Development and Disorders #Mathematics #Psychology #Segmentation #Sequence (biology) #Sequence learning #Statistical analysis #Statistical hypothesis testing #Statistical learning #Statistics

paper · open access · doi:10.1111/cdev.12247

published in Child Development 85(5), 1821-1826 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2014/04/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Throughout their 1st year, infants adeptly detect statistical structure in their environment. However, little is known about whether statistical learning is a primary mechanism for event segmentation. This study directly tests whether statistical learning alone is sufficient to segment continuous events. Twenty-eight 7- to 9-month-old infants viewed a sequence of continuous actions performed by a novel agent in which there were no transitional movements that could have constrained the possible upcoming actions. At test, infants distinguished statistically intact units from less predictable ones. The ability to segment events using statistical structure may help infants discover other cues to event boundaries, such as intentions, and carve up the world of continuous motion in meaningful ways.

Citations

• Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults

Cited by

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• Expectancy violations promote learning in young children. [europepmc]
• Statistical learning in social action contexts. [europepmc]
• Infant Statistical Learning. [europepmc]
• Infants' Motor Proficiency and Statistical Learning for Actions. [europepmc]
• When learning goes beyond statistics: Infants represent visual sequences in terms of chunks. [europepmc]
• Violations of Core Knowledge Shape Early Learning. [europepmc]
• Learning From Others: The Effects of Agency on Event Memory in Young Children. [europepmc]
• Specificity of representations in infants' visual statistical learning. [europepmc]
• Adaptive rule learning of event sequences during the A-not-B task in 9-month-old infants. [europepmc]
• Human Actions Support Infant Memory. [europepmc]
• Learning non-adjacent rules and non-adjacent dependencies from human actions in 9-month-old infants. [europepmc]
• Visual statistical learning in deaf and hearing infants and toddlers. [europepmc]
• Visual statistical learning in preverbal infants at a higher likelihood of autism and its association with later social communication skills. [europepmc]
• The infant brain rapidly entrains to visual statistical regularities during stimulus exposure. [europepmc]
• Second-Language Learning Facilitates Non-Adjacent Dependency Learning: Effects Moderated by Specific Language. [europepmc]

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