Children automatically abstract categorical regularities during statistical learning

Statistical learning allows us to discover myriad structures in our environment, which is saturated with information at many different levels—from items to categories. How do children learn different levels of information—about regularities that pertain to items and the categories they come from—and how does this differ from adults? Studies on category learning and memory have suggested that children may be more focused on items than adults. If this is also the case for statistical learning, children may not extract and learn the multi‐level regularities that adults can. We report three experiments showing that children and adults extract both item‐ and category‐level regularities in statistical learning. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that both children and adults can learn structure at the item and category levels when they are measured independently. In Experiment 3, we show that both children and adults learn about categories even when exposure does not require this: both are able to generalize their learning from the item to the category level. Results indicate that statistical learning operates across multi‐level structure in children and adults alike, enabling generalization of learning from specific items to exemplars from categories of those items that observers have never seen. Even though children may be more focused on items during other forms of learning, they learn about categories from item‐level input during statistical learning.