Does animacy affect visual statistical learning? Revisiting the effects of selective attention and animacy on visual statistical learning

Animates receive preferential attentional processing over inanimates because, from an evolutionary perspective, animates are important to human survival. We investigated whether animacy affects visual statistical learning—the detection and extraction of regularities in visual information from our rich, dynamic, and complex environment. Participants completed a selective-attention task, in which regularities were embedded in two visual streams, an attended and an unattended visual stream. The attended visual stream always consisted of line-drawings of non-objects, while the unattended visual stream consisted of line-drawings of either animates or inanimates. Participants then completed a triplet-discrimination task, which assessed their ability to extract regularities from the attended and unattended visual streams. We also assessed participants’ awareness of regularities in the visual statistical learning task, and asked if any learning strategies were used. We were specifically interested in whether the animacy status of line-drawings in the unattended visual stream would affect visual statistical learning. There were four key findings. First, selective attention modulates visual statistical learning, with greater visual statistical learning for attended than for unattended information. Second, animacy does not affect visual statistical learning, with no differences found in visual statistical learning performance between the animate and inanimate condition. Third, awareness of regularities was associated with visual statistical learning of attended information. Fourth, participants used strategies (e.g., naming or labelling stimuli) during the visual statistical learning task. Further research is required to understand whether visual statistical learning is one of the adaptive functions that evolved from ancestral environments.