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ESCOP 2011, 17th MEETING OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 29th Sep. - 02nd Oct.

Human and implicit learning

Saturday, October 01st,   2011 [17:20 - 19:20]

PS_2.040 - Simultaneous online tracking of adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies in statistical learning

Vuong, L. 1 , Meyer, A. 1 & Christiansen, M. 2

1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2 Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

When children learn their native language, they have to deal with a confusing array of dependencies between various elements in an utterance. Some of these dependencies may be adjacent to one another whereas others can be separated by considerable intervening material. In this study, we investigate whether both types of dependencies can be learned together, similarly to the task facing young children. Statistical learning of adjacent dependencies (probability = .17) and non-adjacent dependencies (probability = 1.0) was assessed in two experiments using a modified serial-reaction-time task. The results showed (i) increasing online sensitivity to both dependency types during training, (ii) better non-adjacency than adjacency learning, and (iii) non-adjacency learning being highly correlated with adjacency learning, suggesting that adjacency and non-adjacency learning can occur in parallel and might be subserved by a common statistical learning mechanism. An overnight break between two training sessions helped the online learning performance of slower learners to approach that of faster learners, but the same amount of training without such a break (a 15-min interval) did not, suggesting that memory consolidation may play a role in statistical learning of complex statistical patterns, especially for slower learners.




PS_2.041 - The omission of an expected cue has functional properties of a contextual change

Pérez Cubillas, C. & Vadillo, M. A.

Universidad de Deusto

Information-retrieval effects, such as renewal, reinstatement or spontaneous recovery are well-studied phenomena in the literature on human and non-human learning. These effects consist of the retrieval of first learned information after an interference treatment (e.g., X+ trials followed by X- trials). Within this framework, context change (either physical, associative or temporal) is considered responsible for the retrieval of the first- or the second-learned association. But what is a context change? The context is usually defined as set of constant, nonsalient and nonpredictive stimuli. We conducted three experiments showing that the absence of an expected cue can have similar effects as a context switch. In these experiments, a cue received an overshadowed treatment (AX+) in a first phase. After that, in a second phase, these cues were paired with a different consequence (AX-). In the test phase, only one of the cues (X) was presented. This variation in the presentation of the cue lead participants to partially retrieve the first-learned association, showing an intermediate level of responding to cue X. None of the theories that are usually invoked in the literature to account for information retrieval can explain this data satisfactorily.




PS_2.042 - Changing explicit and implicit attitudes towards homeless with evaluative conditioning

Siemieniuk, A. , Sweklej, J. & Balas, R.

Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities

The aim of the study was to examine whether different types of odors could (un)consciously influence people’s attitudes towards homeless via evaluative conditioning (EC). The results of pre-test showed that the majority of people have a negative attitude to the target group. The explicit (questionnaire and direct scale) and implicit (priming task) attitude to homeless was measured. We checked if participants’ attitudes changed as a result of conditioning phase in which subtle odorants (different on affective congruence in explicit and implicit evaluation) were paired with affective pictures of homeless people. It was hypothesized that the affectively congruent odor would be able to increase both implicit and explicit attitudes towards homeless, but explicitly neutral and implicitly positive odor could increase the latent attitude toward homeless. In contrast, odor perceived as explicitly positive and implicitly as a neutral could increase explicit attitude. The results indicate successful conditioning of attitudes on implicit and explicit levels of measurement. Moreover, the EC effects were more pronounced when a lemon scent was used as unconditioned stimulus. This effect might be due to a common association of a lemon scent with cleanness and freshness.




PS_2.043 - Implicit contextual learning with multiple cues

van Asselen, M. , Rodrigues, A. . & Castelo-Branco, M.

IBILI, Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra

Implicit contextual cueing is a learning mechanism in which visual information from our environment is memorized in order to facilitate visual search. In the current study we investigate how different types of contextual information presented simultaneously can facilitate visual search. It is known that both spatial and object cues can facilitate visual search, but it remains unclear how two different types of cues presented together can do so. Therefore, we tested 20 healthy young adults with a contextual cueing task including object identity and spatial configuration as cues. We found that when both cues are used, the contextual cueing effect is much larger than when only a single cue is used. Furthermore, a larger effect was found for spatial cues than for object cues. Finally, eye movement data that was recorded during the contextual cueing task confirm previous studies showing that spatial based contextual cueing is associated with a reduction in the number of fixations that are made (Peterson & Kramer, 2001; Tseng and Li, 2004), whereas object based cueing is associated with shorter fixation durations (Van Asselen, 2010).




PS_2.044 - Automatic sequence learning in young children: the effects of reading and arithmetic fluency

de Vries, M. , Reed, H. , Gemmink, M. & Jolles, J.

VU University Amsterdam

Many daily routines, such as reading, walking, and riding a bike, are performed effortlessly and without paying much attention to it, in other words, these skills have become automatic. Some children have difficulties arriving at the level of automaticity when learning new skills at school, resulting in, for instance, problems in reading and arithmetic fluency. This may be caused by a rather domain-general deficit in the procedural memory system (e.g., Nicolson & Fawcett, 2010), involved in the acquisition of cognitive and motor skills and mediated by frontal-striatal-cerebellar regions (Packard & Knowlton, 2002; Ullman, 2004). A typical test of automatized sequence learning is the so-called serial reaction time task (SRTT; Nissen & Bullemer, 1987). In our study, 28 Dutch children in Grade 2 and 3 participated in an adapted version of SRTT. We hypothesized that children with low scores on reading and arithmetic fluency would show a significantly smaller effect of automatized sequence learning. The results showed that reading fluency did not affect serial reaction time performance. However, as expected, children with low scores on the arithmetic fluency test performed significantly worse on the serial reaction time task. The implications of the results are discussed.




PS_2.045 - Influence of sad mood on visual statistical learning

Bertels, J. 1, 2 , Demoulin, C. 1 , San Anton, M. E. 1 , Franco, A. 1, 3 & Destrebecqz, A. 1

1 Université Libre de Bruxelles
2 Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
3 Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg

It is well established that mood influences many cognitive processes, such as learning and executive functions. Although statistical learning is assumed to be part of our daily life, as mood does, the influence of mood on statistical learning has never been investigated before. In the present study, a sad vs. neutral mood was induced to the participants through the listening of stories while they were exposed to a stream of visual shapes made up of the repeated presentation of four triplets, namely sequences of three shapes presented in a fixed order. Given that the inter-stimulus interval was constant within and across triplets, the only cues available for triplet segmentation were the transitional probabilities between shapes. Both direct and indirect measures of learning revealed that participants learned the statistical regularities between shapes. Interestingly, although they performed similarly in the sad and neutral mood conditions, sad participants were more confident in their responses. Moreover, the combined analysis of objective and subjective measures of consciousness revealed that while “neutral” participants’ performance relied on both explicit and implicit knowledge of the regularities, sad participants’ performance most probably relied exclusively on extensive explicit knowledge.




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