Special Issue Resulting from Previous SL conference

Special Issue Resulting from Previous SL conference (#StatLearnBCBL):

We are pleased to announce that early online access is now available for a special issue on New Frontiers for Statistical Learning in the Cognitive Sciences [B. C. Armstrong, R. Frost, & M. H. Christiansen, Eds.], which will appear in print in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences, in January.

Overview of the Issue:

Two decades ago, statistical learning (SL) was proposed as a powerful domain-general mechanism for processing a wide range of regularities. However, because of its rather narrow focus, SL research has largely failed to deliver on the wide-reaching promise of SL as a theoretical construct. This is mainly due to SL being investigated largely a separate ability, isolated from other aspects of cognition. This theme issue fosters a transition to studying statistical learning as an integral part of different cognitive systems, taking into consideration complementary perspectives from neurobiology, computation, development and evolutionary studies. This collection of work by international leaders from a range of disciplines shows that statistical learning is not simply learning to accurately represent the regularities of the environment. Rather it is a product of the complex interaction between environmental statistics, the neurocomputational principles of the cognitive systems in which learning takes place, and pre-existing biases due to previous experience and/or architectural constraints of the brain. This new perspective will enable statistical learning to impact a broad range of theories related to language, vision, audition, memory and social behaviour.

The full introduction to the special issue and a synopsis of the 13 articles in the theme issues is available at: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1711/20160047

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The neurobiology of uncertainty: implications for statistical learning

Uri Hasson

Complementary learning systems within the hippocampus: a neural network modelling approach to reconciling episodic memory with statistical learning

Anna C. Schapiro, Nicholas B. Turk-Browne, Matthew M. Botvinick, Kenneth A. Norman

Do infants retain the statistics of a statistical learning experience? Insights from a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective

Rebecca L. Gómez

The multi-component nature of statistical learning

Joanne Arciuli

Towards a theory of individual differences in statistical learning

Noam Siegelman, Louisa Bogaerts, Morten H. Christiansen, Ram Frost

Real-world visual statistics and infants' first-learned object names

Elizabeth M. Clerkin, Elizabeth Hart, James M. Rehg, Chen Yu, Linda B. Smith

Statistical learning in songbirds: from self-tutoring to song culture

Olga Fehér, Iva Ljubičić, Kenta Suzuki, Kazuo Okanoya, Ofer Tchernichovski

The impact of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on learning fine-motor sequences

Renee E. Shimizu, Allan D. Wu, Jasmine K. Samra, Barbara J. Knowlton

What's statistical about learning? Insights from modelling statistical learning as a set of memory processes

Erik D. Thiessen

TRACX2: a connectionist autoencoder using graded chunks to model infant visual statistical learning

Denis Mareschal, Robert M. French

Abstraction and generalization in statistical learning: implications for the relationship between semantic types and episodic tokens

Gerry T. M. Altmann

Language learning, language use and the evolution of linguistic variation

Kenny Smith, Amy Perfors, Olga Fehér, Anna Samara, Kate Swoboda, Elizabeth Wonnacott