IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0270580.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Detecting non-adjacent dependencies is the exception rather than the rule

Author

Listed:
  • Laure Tosatto
  • Guillem Bonafos
  • Jean-Baptiste Melmi
  • Arnaud Rey

Abstract

Statistical learning refers to our sensitivity to the distributional properties of our environment. Humans have been shown to readily detect the dependency relationship of events that occur adjacently in a stream of stimuli but processing non-adjacent dependencies (NADs) appears more challenging. In the present study, we tested the ability of human participants to detect NADs in a new Hebb-naming task that has been proposed recently to study regularity detection in a noisy environment. In three experiments, we found that most participants did not manage to extract NADs. These results suggest that the ability to learn NADs in noise is the exception rather than the rule. They provide new information about the limits of statistical learning mechanisms.

Suggested Citation

  • Laure Tosatto & Guillem Bonafos & Jean-Baptiste Melmi & Arnaud Rey, 2022. "Detecting non-adjacent dependencies is the exception rather than the rule," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(7), pages 1-13, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0270580
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270580
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270580
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270580&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0270580?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timothy Q. Gentner & Kimberly M. Fenn & Daniel Margoliash & Howard C. Nusbaum, 2006. "Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds," Nature, Nature, vol. 440(7088), pages 1204-1207, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.

      More about this item

      Statistics

      Access and download statistics

      Corrections

      All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0270580. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

      If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

      If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

      If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

      For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

      Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

      IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.