Unspoken knowledge: Implicit learning of structured human dance movement.

The sequencing of dance movements may be thought of as a grammar. We investigate implicit learning of regularities that govern sequences of unfamiliar, discrete dance movements. It was hypothesized that observers without prior experience with contemporary dance would be able to learn regularities that underpin structured human movement. Thirty-one adults were assigned to either an exposure or a control group. Exposure consisted of 22 grammatical 3-, 4-, and 5-movement sequences presented twice in random order; sequence duration ranged from 9 to 19 s. In a test phase, exposure and control groups identified previously unseen sequences as grammatical or ungrammatical, and rated confidence of judgment. The exposure group selected significantly more new grammatical sequences in the test phase than the control group. In addition, for the exposure group, the zero correlation criterion, wherein no relation between confidence and accuracy indicates unconscious knowledge, was satisfied. Through exposure, novice observers can learn a grammar that governs the sequencing of dance movements. This has implications for implicit learning of long sequences, working memory, and the development of expectations through exposure to contemporary dance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit learning and generalization of the "mere exposure" effect.

Reports 2 experiments that examined the generalization of the "mere exposure" effect. Both experiments demonstrated that positive affect, produced by repeated viewing of a set of stimuli, generalizes to previously unseen stimuli that are similar to the exposed stimuli along certain abstract dimensions. Exp I, with 82 Ss, used letter strings constructed according to a complex rule system. Positive affect attributable to exposure generalized to novel letter strings that obeyed the rule system. Affective generalization was related to Ss' judgments of whether the novel strings obeyed the rule system. Exp II (40 Ss), in which the stimuli were complex visual patterns created by distorting standard forms, yielded an orderly gradient of affective generalization to novel patterns at varying levels of distortion. Results indicate that the exposure effect behaves in a manner similar to "implicit" concept learning and rule induction. The generalization techniques developed here provide a novel method for studying the affective processing of stimuli. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit learning of nonlocal musical rules: A comment on Kuhn and Dienes (2005).

In a recent study, G. Kuhn and Z. Dienes (2005) reported that participants previously exposed to a set of musical tunes generated by a biconditional grammar subsequently preferred new tunes that respected the grammar over new ungrammatical tunes. Because the study and test tunes did not share any chunks of adjacent intervals, this result may be construed as straightforward evidence for the implicit learning of a structure that was only governed by nonlocal dependency rules. It is shown here that the grammar modified the statistical distribution of perceptually salient musical events, such as the probability that tunes covered an entire octave. When the influence of these confounds was removed, the effect of grammaticality disappeared. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recollection, Fluency, and the Explicit/Implicit Distinction in Artificial Grammar Learning.

In this article, the authors propose that both implicit memory and implicit learning phenomena can be explained by a common set of principles, in particular via participants' strategic use of recollective and fluency heuristics. In a series of experiments, it was demonstrated that manipulating processing fluency had an impact on classification decisions in an artificial grammar learning task (Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 7), showing that participants were using a fluency heuristic. Under identical conditions, however, this manipulation had no effect on recognition decisions (Experiments 3 and 5), consistent with a greater default reliance on recollection. Most significant, the authors also showed that a fluency effect can be induced in recognition (Experiments 4-6) and can be eliminated in classification (Experiment 7). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theories of artificial grammar learning.

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is one of the most commonly used paradigms for the study of implicit learning and the contrast between rules, similarity, and associative learning. Despite five decades of extensive research, however, a satisfactory theoretical consensus has not been forthcoming. Theoretical accounts of AGL are reviewed, together with relevant human experimental and neuroscience data. The author concludes that satisfactory understanding of AGL requires (a) an understanding of implicit knowledge as knowledge that is not consciously activated at the time of a cognitive operation; this could be because the corresponding representations are impoverished or they cannot be concurrently supported in working memory with other representations or operations, and (b) adopting a frequency-independent view of rule knowledge and contrasting rule knowledge with specific similarity and associative learning (co-occurrence) knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit Learning of Musical Timbre Sequences: Statistical Regularities Confronted With Acoustical (Dis)Similarities.

The present study investigated the influence of acoustical characteristics on the implicit learning of statistical regularities (transition probabilities) in sequences of musical timbres. The sequences were constructed in such a way that the acoustical dissimilarities between timbres potentially created segmentations that either supported (S1) or contradicted (S2) the statistical regularities or were neutral (S3). In the learning group, participants first listened to the continuous timbre sequence and then had to distinguish statistical units from new units. In comparison to a control group without the exposition phase, no interaction between sequence type and amount of learning was observed: Performance increased by the same amount for the three sequences. In addition, performance reflected an overall preference for acoustically similar timbre units. The present outcome extends previous data from the domain of implicit learning to complex nonverbal auditory material. It further suggests that listeners become sensitive to statistical regularities despite acoustical characteristics in the material that potentially affect grouping. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceived Facial Expressions of Emotion as Motivational Incentives: Evidence From a Differential Implicit Learning Paradigm.

Participants (N = 216) were administered a differential implicit learning task during which they were trained and tested on 3 maximally distinct 2nd-order visuomotor sequences, with sequence color serving as discriminative stimulus. During training, 1 sequence each was followed by an emotional face, a neutral face, and no face, using backward masking. Emotion (joy, surprise, anger), face gender, and exposure duration (12 ms, 209 ms) were varied between participants; implicit motives were assessed with a picture-story exercise. For power-motivated individuals, low-dominance facial expressions enhanced and high-dominance expressions impaired learning. For affiliation-motivated individuals, learning was impaired in the context of hostile faces. These findings did not depend on explicit learning of fixed sequences or on awareness of sequence-face contingencies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Encoding Multielement Scenes: Statistical Learning of Visual Feature Hierarchies.

The authors investigated how human adults encode and remember parts of multielement scenes composed of recursively embedded visual shape combinations. The authors found that shape combinations that are parts of larger configurations are less well remembered than shape combinations of the same kind that are not embedded. Combined with basic mechanisms of statistical learning, this embeddedness constraint enables the development of complex new features for acquiring internal representations efficiently without being computationally intractable. The resulting representations also encode parts and wholes by chunking the visual input into components according to the statistical coherence of their constituents. These results suggest that a bootstrapping approach of constrained statistical learning offers a unified framework for investigating the formation of different internal representations in pattern and scene perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hyperspecificity in Visual Implicit Learning: Learning of Spatial Layout Is Contingent on Item Identity.

Humans conduct visual search faster when the same display is presented for a 2nd time, showing implicit learning of repeated displays. This study examines whether learning of a spatial layout transfers to other layouts that are occupied by items of new shapes or colors. The authors show that spatial context learning is sometimes contingent on item identity. For example, when the training session included some trials with black items and other trials with white items, learning of the spatial layout became specific to the trained color--no transfer was seen when items were in a new color during testing. However, when the training session included only trials in black (or white), learning transferred to displays with a new color. Similar results held when items changed shapes after training. The authors conclude that implicit visual learning is sensitive to trial context and that spatial context learning can be identity contingent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit Sequence Learning: Effects of Level of Structure, Adult Age, and Extended Practice.

The influence of structure and age on sequence learning was investigated by testing 24 young and 24 older participants for 10 sessions in an alternating serial response time task in which pattern trials alternated with random trials. Individuals encountered lag-2 or lag-3 structure, and learning was measured by the difference (in response time and accuracy) between pattern and random trials. Both ages learned lag-2 structure, but the young learned more than the older participants. Only the young people learned lag-3 structure, and they did so more slowly and to a lesser degree than they learned lag-2 structure. These age deficits in higher order sequence learning after extended practice are consistent with simultaneity theory and with theories positing that age-related deficits in neuromodulation lead to less distinctive representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning correct responses and errors in the Hebb repetition effect: Two faces of the same coin.

In a serial recall task, the Hebb repetition effect occurs when recall performance improves for a sequence repeated throughout the experimental session. This phenomenon has been replicated many times. Nevertheless, such cumulative learning seldom leads to perfect recall of the whole sequence, and errors persist. Here the authors report evidence that there is another side to the Hebb repetition effect that involves learning errors produced in a repeated sequence. A learning measure based on past recalls (correct or incorrect) shows that the probability of a given response increases with the number of prior occurrences of that response. The pattern of results reveals another manifestation of the Hebb repetition effect and speaks to the nature of implicit learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Influence of Grammatical, Local, and Organizational Redundancy on Implicit Learning: An Analysis Using Information Theory.

People behave as if they know the structure of their environment. Because people rarely study that structure explicitly, several theorists have postulated an implicit learning system that abstracts that structure automatically. An alternative view is that people respond to local structure that derives from global structure. Measures are developed that quantify structure in a set of stimuli, in individual stimuli, and in encoded stimuli. The authors apply the measures to examine serial recall for sequences of colors generated using a stationary Markov grammar. They demonstrate that the 3 kinds of redundancy are confounded and show that the memorial advantage for grammatical stimuli reflects participants' use of local expressions of grammatical structure to aid learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)