About this session

Thursday, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Developmental Dynamics Between Higher-Order Cognitive Control and Bottom-Up Statistical Learning

A hallmark of child development is the growing ability to regulate attention and carry out goal-relevant behaviors with increasing efficiency. These set of top-down cognitive control (executive function) abilities become more important with age as older children are expected to become increasingly autonomous (Chevalier, 2015). Paradoxically, immature cognitive control may be advantageous in childhood: Less top-down guidance allows children to have more diffuse attention, thus processing a wider range of environmental information (Thompson-Schill et al., 2009). Relatedly, underdeveloped cognitive control may be associated with a greater ability to implicitly extract patterns from the environment in a bottom-up, data-driven fashion (Saffran, 2020). These ‘statistical learning’ abilities play a role in important processes such as language development (e.g., learning when certain sounds in speech tend to follow other sounds). Experiments with adults suggest that cognitive control processes may interact with statistical learning in a competitive manner (Pedraza et al., 2024). However, relatively little work has explored how cognitive control and statistical learning develop concurrently in early childhood. This symposium brings together longitudinal and cross-sectional work, including behavioral and neuropsychological measures, to investigate how visual statistical learning and cognitive control change with age. Additionally, it includes findings from controlled experiments that directly test which aspects of cognitive control, and the contexts in which it is engaged, interact with bottom-up statistical learning. Importantly, this symposium aims to further our understanding of the multifaceted nature of statistical learning and bridge the gap between two major aspects of cognition which are typically studied separately.

Paper #1
Title	Investigating the Dynamics Between Childhood Cognitive Control and Three Types of Statistical Learning
Presenting author	Dr. Matthew Daniel Johnston, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Paper #2
Title	Learning Information Outside of Task Focus: a Developmental Study of Associative Learning and Cognitive Control
Presenting author	Rachel Foster, University of California, Davis, United States

Paper #3
Title	Competition Between Predictive Processes and Prefrontal Cortex Functions During Development
Presenting author	Dr. Dezso Nemeth, INSERM, France

Paper #4
Title	How Working Memory Shapes Early Attention and Learning
Presenting author	Qianqian Wan, Ohio State University, United States

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Session chairs
Dr. Matthew Daniel Johnston, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Dr. Nicolas Chevalier, Ph.D., , United Kingdom

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