Objective and subjective measures of cross-situational learning.

Franco, A. ^{1, 2} , Cleeremans, A. ^{1, 2} & Destrebecqz, A. ^{1, 2}

1 Université Libre de Bruxelles
2 Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences

In cross-situational learning, participants learn word meanings by processing statistical regularities of co-occurrence between auditory presented words and pictures of their referents. After being exposed to these regularities, learning is measured through a recognition task in which participants have to associate words and their referents.
Results of Experiment 1 show that participants learned equally well two different sets of associations. In Experiment 2, participants were successively exposed to these two sets of associations. Cross-situational learning and the conscious accessibility of the acquired knowledge were measured by using an adaptation of the Process Dissociation Procedure (Jacoby, 1991) to the recognition task, combined with binary confidence judgements.
Results show that participants successfully learned the two sets of associations. They were also able to control their use of this knowledge as they accurately identified the set to which each association belonged. Confidence judgments revealed that participants correctly identified the learned associations even when they claimed to guess. These results suggest that cross-situational learning involve a mixture of both conscious and unconscious influences.