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Effects of offline consolidation on statistical learning across development

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Alana Jaskir¹, Catherine Hartley¹; ¹New York University

Learning the statistical regularities of an environment supports flexibility and creativity. For example, a beginner pianist can perform a song using rote memorization, but only an expert may explicitly recognize and manipulate repeating patterns (e.g., chord progressions), allowing for generalization and improvisation. Sleep–known to facilitate creative insight and problem-solving–may provide an opportunity for statistical learning to be reformatted into more generalizable and explicit knowledge via memory consolidation mechanisms. While adults often exhibit both implicit and explicit knowledge without consolidation, sleep may disproportionately affect children’s acquisition of explicit measures (Wilhelm et al., 2013). In this work, we test whether sleep facilitates explicit awareness of statistical regularities and if children’s explicit knowledge shows greater improvement than adults after a night of sleep. Forty children (8–10 years) and forty adults (20–25 years) will complete a child-friendly version of an established ”community-structure” statistical learning task (Schapiro et al., 2013; Pudhiyidath et al., 2020), followed by two task-based measures of explicit knowledge (Nussenbaum et al., 2025). Analyses will also leverage a recently developed model-fitting approach that uses trial-by-trial reaction time data to disentangle learning processes (Kahn et al., 2024; Nussenbaum et al., 2025) that may relate to explicit knowledge measures. Participants complete two sessions of the task, separated either by a period of wakefulness or sleep. Measures of explicit knowledge of the task are collected at the end of the second session. Data collection is nearly complete and preliminary analyses will be presented at the conference.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging