Three experiments investigated the ability of human observers to extract th
e joint and conditional probabilities of shape cooccurrences during passive
viewing of complex visual scenes. Results indicated that statistical learn
ing of shape conjunctions was both rapid and automatic, as subjects were no
t instructed to attend to any particular features of the displays. Moreover
, in addition to single-shape frequency, subjects acquired in parallel seve
ral different higher-order aspects of the statistical structure of the disp
lays, including absolute shape-position relations in an array, shape-pair a
rrangements independent of position, and conditional probabilities of shape
co-occurrences. Unsupervised learning of these higher-order statistics pro
vides support for Barlow's theory of visual recognition, which posits that
detecting "suspicious coincidences" of elements during recognition is a nec
essary prerequisite for efficient learning of new visual features.