Statistical and sequence learning lead to persistent memory in children after a one-year offline period

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental neuroscience
• Skill acquisition

Background:

• Human learning relies on extracting environmental patterns, including statistical and serial order regularities.
• While short-term memory for these regularities is well-studied, long-term retention, especially in children, remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the long-term memory performance of probability-based and serial order-based regularities over a 1-year period in neurotypical children.
• To assess if age influences the retention of these learned patterns in children aged 9-15.

Main Methods:

• A visuomotor four-choice reaction time task was used to assess acquisition of both regularity types simultaneously.
• Participants were tested after a 5-hour delay to control for short-term consolidation and again after a 1-year offline period without practice.

Main Results:

• Children successfully acquired both probability-based and serial order-based regularities.
• Both types of learned knowledge were retained over the 1-year period, independent of the participants' age.

Conclusions:

• The representation of statistical and serial order regularities is stable over extended periods in children.
• Findings provide indirect support for the developmental invariance model of skill consolidation, suggesting robust long-term memory for learned patterns.