Submission 376
Catching Regularities: Statistical Learning of Spatiotemporal Hotspots in Dynamic Foraging Marian Sauter & Jan Tünnermann
SymposiumTalk-03
Presented by: Marian Sauter
Adaptive behavior depends on the ability to detect and exploit regularities in the environment. Statistical learning has been shown to shape attentional priority maps in static tasks, but its contribution to active exploration of dynamic environments remains understudied. This study examines how humans learn and adapt to probabilistic structure in a dynamic foraging task. In interactive displays with moving targets and distractors, participants collected conjunction-defined targets that followed biased trajectories. Experiment 1 revealed emergent spatial biases toward high-probability target regions; Experiment 2 demonstrated flexible reweighting after contingency shifts; Experiment 3 (ongoing) tests continuous adaptation to a moving hotspot. The findings advance theories of selection history and predictive control, with statistical learning as a mechanism for adaptive exploration in dynamic environments.