Roczniewska, M. , Sterczyński, R. & Popławska, A.
Faculty in Sopot. Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Sopot, Poland.
Since the discovery of the implicit learning phenomenon (Reber, 1967), the mechanism of learning described by concurrent hypotheses still invites inquiry. To tackle this problem, we decided to adopt dual task paradigm, developed as a tool designed to test competition over resources. In this procedure, participants are asked to perform two tasks simultaneously; a decrease in performance (as compared to single-task) is interpreted as a result of the competition. As the learning in AGL task is deemed implicit, the second task is implicit as well. In our experiments, participants are exposed to a second tacit rule while performing regular AGL tasks. In three experiments conducted, we have observed: a decrease in classification accuracy when second tacit rule was present (first experiment) and no change in classification accuracy but in strategy used to distinguish regular from irregular strings (second and third experiment). Namely, participants included regular strings into grammatical category more often than excluded irregular strings from this category (classification for regular items was significantly more efficient than for irregular), but only in the group with a second implicit rule. We discuss these results in the light of the role of the resources determining the effectiveness of learning process.