Primary Lab Affiliations

Marvin Chun - Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Brian Scholl - Perception & Cognition Lab

Other Collaborators at Yale

Marcia Johnson
Greg McCarthy

Statistical Learning

There is growing evidence that a basic task of the human visual system is to extract statistical regularities in its input. Such forms of learning could be the basis of our remarkable ability to segment the visual environment into discrete objects, scenes, and events. However, this process is not very well understood. We are conducting several lines of research to explore the mechanisms involved in statistical learning, and how acquiring implicit knowledge of regularities can in turn affect performance:

Turk-Browne, N. B., Jungé, J. A., & Scholl, B. J. (2005). The automaticity of visual statistical learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 552-564.

Turk-Browne, N. B., Isola, P. J., Scholl, B. J., & Treat, T. A. (2008). Multidimensional visual statistical learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 399-407.

Turk-Browne, N. B., & Scholl, B. J. (in press). Flexible visual statistical learning: Transfer across space and time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

Turk-Browne, N. B., Scholl, B. J., Chun, M. M., & Johnson, M. K. (under review). Neural evidence of statistical learning: Efficient detection of visual regularities without awareness.

Turk-Browne, N. B., Scholl, B. J., Johnson, M. K., & Chun, M. M. (in preparation). Prospection during incidental visual statistical learning of predictive temporal regularities.

Perceptual Memory

Memory is a natural consequence of perception. This type of encoding occurs without effort and after surprisingly short amounts of exposure, but nevertheless changes future interactions with our visual environment. We are exploring several fundamental aspects of perceptual memory, such as how it is constrained by attention, reflection, and cues to object persistence, and how implicit perceptual encoding contributes to task performance and explicit recognition:

Turk-Browne, N. B., Yi, D. J., & Chun, M. M. (2006). Linking implicit and explicit memory: Common encoding factors and shared representations. Neuron, 49, 917-927.

Turk-Browne, N. B., Yi, D. J., Leber, A. B., & Chun, M. M. (2007). Visual quality determines the direction of neural repetition effects. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 425-433.

Xu, Y., Turk-Browne, N. B., & Chun, M. M. (2007). Dissociating task performance from fMRI repetition attenuation in ventral visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 5981-5985.

Yi, D. J., Turk-Browne, N. B., Johnson, M. K., & Chun, M. M. (2008). When a thought equals a look: Refreshing enhances perceptual encoding. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 1371-1380.

Yi, D. J., Turk-Browne, N. B., Flombaum, J. I., Scholl, B. J., & Chun, M. M. (2008). Spatiotemporal object continuity in human ventral visual cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 8840-8845.

Turk-Browne, N. B., Scholl, B. J., & Chun, M. M. (under review). Habituation in infant cognition and functional neuroimaging.