Szegedi-Hallgató, E. 1, 2 , Janacsek, K. 3, 4, 5 & Németh, D. 3, 4, 5, 6
1 Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
2 Institute of Psychology, SZTE University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary
3 Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
4 Brain, Memory and Language Research Group, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology
5 Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
6 Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL), Université de Lyon, Lyon, France
The Alternating Serial Reaction Time task (ASRT, Howard & Howard, 1997) is a visuomotor sequence learning task used by researchers studying implicit learning phenomena and statistical learning. We reexamined the analysis methods typically associated with the task and came to the conclusion that more attention should be paid to pre-existing biases (e.g. by eliminating artifacts using different filters) and to the inherent statistical structure of the sequence that is being taught to participants. The new analysis protocol that we propose results in more types of learning scores that can be quantified, purer measures, and higher individual variability (possibly indicating that at least some of the variability had been masked using the typical methods). The implications of our findings relate to other sequence learning tasks as well, and opens up opportunities to study different types of statistical learning phenomena.