A crucial aspect in our ability to adapt to environments is our learning of their characteristic stimuli summary statistics. But what should be the dynamics of this learning to obtain optimal predictions?I will present a series of behavioral, computational and imaging studies which show that people with dyslexia and people with autism manifest opposite atypicalities in their learning dynamics.In Dyslexia learning is fast but perceptual memories decay quickly, disrupting their acquisition of fixed language statistics (e.g. structure and frequency of syllables). By contrast, in autism, learning lasts long, but is difficult to modify, hampering flexibility, which is needed in dynamic social and non-social environments.
