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.