Investigating children’s consolidation of different types of statistical input and their relations to executive function development – a longitudinal study

Through statistical learning (SL), children implicitly extract repeated patterns in their environment. The developmental trajectory of how children consolidate different statistical information is poorly understood. Furthermore, how SL contributes to other developmental processes, like executive function, has received surprisingly little attention. In an accelerated longitudinal design, we assessed 187 5-12-year-olds’ (42.8%= female, 84.6%= White) SL and executive function capacities over 16 months. Cue-based SL and consolidation of nonadjacent probabilistic sequences were age-invariant. However, 5-6-year-olds demonstrated enhanced abilities to apply previously learned deterministic sequences to novel scenarios. Regarding SL-executive function links, greater sensitivity to adjacent conditional regularities at Time 2 predicted executive function increases between Times 2-3 for 8-9-year-olds, though this effect was weak and absent in younger and older groups.