Chiara Santolin

University Pompeu Fabra | UPF · Center of Brain and Cognition (CBC)

Both human and nonhuman organisms are sensitive to statistical regularities in sensory inputs that support functions including communication, visual processing, and sequence learning. One of the issues faced by comparative research in this field is the lack of a comprehensive theory to explain the relevance of statistical learning across distinct e...

The ability to extract probabilistic information from visual inputs has been reported in human adults and infants (reviewed in [1,2]), and in adults of non-human species, though only under supervised (conditioning) procedures [3]. Here, we report spontaneous sensitivity to the probabilistic structure underlying sequences of visual stimuli in newly...

Infants acquiring their native language are adept at discovering grammatical patterns. However, it remains unknown whether these learning abilities are limited to language, or available more generally for sequenced input. The current study is a conceptual replication of a prior language study, and was designed to ask whether infants can track phras...

Speech preferences emerge very early in infancy, pointing to a special status for speech in auditory processing and a crucial role of prosody in driving infant preferences. Recent theoretical models suggest that infant auditory perception may initially encompass a broad range of human and non- human vocalizations, then tune in to relevant sounds fo...

Evidence of learning and generalization of visual regularities in a newborn organism is provided in the present research. Domestic chicks have been trained to discriminate visual triplets of simultaneously presented shapes, implementing AAB versus ABA (Experiment 1), AAB versus ABB and AAB versus BAA (Experiment 2). Chicks distinguished pattern-fol...

Syllables are the building blocks of early language acquisition. From birth onwards, infants preferentially segment, process and represent the speech into syllabic units, raising the question of what type of computations infants are able to perform on these perceptual units. Syllables are abstract phonological units structured in a way that allows...

How different is the process of language learning in infants exposed to two languages from birth? Not so long ago, the available evidence pointed to a delay in language learning in bilinguals and suggested differences in several linguistic aspects between monolinguals and bilinguals. At present, the bulk of studies indicates the existence of specif...

Interpreting and predicting direction of preference in infant research has been a thorny issue for decades. Several factors have been proposed to account for familiarity versus novelty preferences, including age, length of exposure, and task complexity. The current study explores an additional dimension: experience with the experimental paradigm. W...

Statistical learning is a key mechanism for detecting regularities from a variety of sensory inputs. Precocial newborn domestic chicks provide an excellent model for (1) exploring unsupervised forms of statistical learning in a comparative perspective, and (2) elucidating the ecological function of statistical learning using imprinting procedures....

Interpreting and predicting direction of preference in infant behavioral research has been a thorny issue for decades. Several factors have been proposed to account for familiarity and novelty preferences in habituation and familiarization studies, including infant age, length of exposure and task complexity. The current study explores an additiona...

Effective communication crucially depends on the ability to produce and recognize structured signals, as apparent in language and birdsong. Although it is not clear to what extent similar syntactic-like abilities can be identified in other animals, recently we reported that domestic chicks can learn abstract visual patterns and the statistical stru...