The work described above has allowed us to establish that inter-individual variability in different types of learning (in particular in: structure learning, statistical learning and audio-visual associative learning) can be observed in adults, even in the context of short (maximum 1 hour) laboratory learning tasks. In the case of structure learning, we have replicated previous findings from the host lab, confirming that in our auditory paradigm – similarly to what was reported in a visuo-spatial version –, only 30% of the population displays the kind of structure learning we are after, in the allocated time.
Our experiments have also enabled us to start digging into the factors – be they demographic, related to life-style or cognitive –, that may be linked to variability in learning. One of the most relevant results is that, thanks to the completion of Aim 1a, we have confirmed our hypothesis that structure learning is linked to attentional skills in the general adult population, replicating this finding in both the in-lab and online populations tested.
The outcomes of Aim 1b – investigating the impact of action video-gaming (and thus heightened attentional control abilities) on statistical learning – preliminarily suggest subtle advantages following action video game practice, a finding in line with many of the host lab previous work.
Overall, we have designed tools to evaluate the determinants of inter-individual learning and used those tools to highlight important links between learning abilities and cognitive skills. A distinctive feature of these tools is the possibility to administer them via online platforms to a large and representative sample of the population. While cognitive testing via online platform has become routine, getting robust measures of learning and how it progresses is new. Moreover, by implementing the testing phase of Aim 3, i.e. assessing associative audio-visual learning performances in children and relating them to reading abilities, we have furthered our knowledge of the factors favouring success in reading acquisition.
By asking what underlies successful learning and specifically reading acquisition (a gateway to many other forms of learning), the project directly addressed crucial societal challenges for the EU in the educational field, namely reinforcing the learning of basic skills such as literacy, as well as making progress towards the design of intervention strategies targeted at poor achievers.
