The influence of statistical information on behavior (either through learning or adaptation) is quickly
becoming foundational to many domains of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, from language
comprehension to visual development. We investigate a central problem impacting these diverse
fields: when encountering input with rich statistical information, are there any constraints on learning?
This paper examines learning outcomes when adult learners are given statistical information across multiple
levels of abstraction simultaneously: from abstract, semantic categories of everyday objects to individual
viewpoints on these objects. After revealing statistical learning of abstract, semantic categories
with scrambled individual exemplars (Exp. 1), participants viewed pictures where the categories as well
as the individual objects predicted picture order (e.g., bird1—dog1, bird2—dog2). Our findings suggest that
participants preferentially encode the relationships between the individual objects, even in the presence
of statistical regularities linking semantic categories (Exps. 2 and 3). In a final experiment we investigate
whether learners are biased towards learning object-level regularities or simply construct the most
detailed model given the data (and therefore best able to predict the specifics of the upcoming stimulus)
by investigating whether participants preferentially learn from the statistical regularities linking individual
snapshots of objects or the relationship between the objects themselves (e.g., bird_picture1—dog_picture1,
bird_picture2—dog_picture2). We find that participants fail to learn the relationships between
individual snapshots, suggesting a bias towards object-level statistical regularities as opposed to merely
constructing the most complete model of the input. This work moves beyond the previous existence proofs
that statistical learning is possible at both very high and very low levels of abstraction (categories vs. individual
objects) and suggests that, at least with the current categories and type of learner, there are biases
to pick up on statistical regularities between individual objects even when robust statistical information is
present at other levels of abstraction. These findings speak directly to emerging theories about how systems
supporting statistical learning and prediction operate in our structure-rich environments. Moreover,
the theoretical implications of the current work across multiple domains of study is already clear: statistical
learning cannot be assumed to be unconstrained even if statistical learning has previously been
established at a given level of abstraction when that information is presented in isolation.