Rebecca L. Gómez studied how variation helps learners detect invariant structure. In an artificial-language experiment, changing the variability of a middle element tested learning of relations between nonadjacent elements. Varying irrelevant material can therefore be informative about which relation a learner extracts, rather than merely adding noise. [ref]
Variability and detection of invariant structure by Rebecca L. Gómez. 2002, middle-element variability and nonadjacent dependencies
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