ISSN : 1229-0718
Regularities in the learning environment allow us to make predictions and guide behavior. Growing evidence of location probability learning (LPL) demonstrates that the statistical regularity of target locations affects spatial attention allocation. However, existing studies on LPL mostly focus on learning in adults. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of LPL, we investigated the effect of target location probability on visual search in children aged 5 to 9 years compared to adults. Both children and adults responded faster when the target appeared in the high probability "rich" quadrant than in the low probability "sparse" quadrants of the search space. Importantly, the magnitude of the bias was constant across participants of various ages and not dependent on individual differences in executive functions. These results provide novel evidence that implicit statistical learning of target locations occurs early in development and remains stable until early adulthood and this is a distinct developmental pattern from learning of explicit goal-driven spatial attention.
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