Bertels, J. 1, 2 , Destrebecqz, A. 1 & Franco, A. 1
1 Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles
2 Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS
Arciuli et al. (2014) recently argued that prior knowledge of the existence of statistical regularities in a sequence of shapes would increase learning of these regularities exclusively in situations allowing the involvement of strategies, namely with long presentation rates.
The aim of the present study was (1) to test this assumption directly by investigating how learning condition (incidental vs. intentional) and presentation rate (fast vs. moderate) affect participants? knowledge of the regularities and (2) to examine how these factors influence the conscious vs. unconscious nature of the acquired knowledge.
We exposed participants to four triplets (i.e. groups of three shapes presented sequentially) and assessed their degree of learning in a subsequent completion task integrating confidence judgments.
Replicating previous results (Bertels et al., 2012), we observed that participants acquired both implicit and explicit knowledge of the triplets, even under incidental learning conditions and at fast presentation rates. Supporting Arciuli et al.?s claim, participants? performance benefited from intentional learning only at moderate presentation rates. Moreover, informing participants about the presence of regularities in the stream beforehand increased their explicit knowledge of the sequences, an effect that was not modulated by presentation speed. These results will be discussed at the conference.