It is increasingly understood that people may learn new word/object mappings in part via a form of statistical learning in which they track co-occurrences between words and objects across situations (cross-situational learning). Multiple learning processes contribute to this, thought to reflect the simultaneous influence of real-time hypothesis testing and graduate learning. It is unclear how these processes interact, and if any require explicit cognitive resources. To manipulate the availability of working memory resources for explicit processing, participants completed a dual-task paradigm in which a cross-situational word-learning task was interleaved with a short-term memory task. We then used trial-by-trial analyses to estimate how different learning processes that play out simultaneously are impacted by resource availability. Critically, we found that the effect of hypothesis testing and gradual learning effects showed a small reduction under limited resources, and that the effect of memory load was not fully mediated by these processes. This suggests that neither is purely explicit, and there may be additional resource-dependent processes at play. Consistent with a hybrid account, these findings suggest that these two aspects of learning may reflect different aspects of a single system gated by attention, rather than competing learning systems.

人们越来越认识到，人们可以部分通过统计学习的形式来学习新的单词/对象映射，在统计学习中，他们可以跟踪不同情况下单词和对象之间的共现（跨情景学习）。多种学习过程促成了这一点，被认为反映了实时假设检验和研究生学习的同时影响。目前尚不清楚这些过程如何相互作用，以及是否需要明确的认知资源。为了操纵工作记忆资源的可用性以进行显式处理，参与者完成了双任务范例，其中跨情境单词学习任务与短期记忆任务交织在一起。然后，我们使用逐项试验分析来估计同时进行的不同学习过程如何受到资源可用性的影响。重要的是，我们发现假设检验和渐进学习效果的效果在有限的资源下显示出小幅降低，并且记忆负载的效果并没有完全由这些过程调节。这表明两者都不是纯粹明确的，并且可能存在其他依赖于资源的过程在起作用。与混合帐户一致，这些发现表明学习的这两个方面可能反映了由注意力控制的单个系统的不同方面，而不是竞争的学习系统。