Implicit learning of a repeated segment in continuous tracking: A reappraisal

Several prior studies (e.g., Shea, Wulf, Whitacre, & Park, 2001; Wulf & Schmidt, 1997) have apparently demonstrated implicit learning of a repeated segment in continuous-tracking tasks. In two conceptual replications of these studies, we failed to reproduce the original findings. However, these findings were reproduced in a third experiment, in which we used the same repeated segment as that used in the Wulf et al. studies. Analyses of the velocity and the acceleration of the target suggests that this repeated segment could be easier to track than the random segments serving as control, accounting for the results of Wulf and collaborators. Overall these experiments suggest that lea…

Centre-embedded structures are a by-product of associative learning and working memory constraints: Evidence from baboons (Papio Papio)

International audience; Influential theories have claimed that the ability for recursion forms the computational core of human language faculty distinguishing our communication system from that of other animals (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). In the present study, we consider an alternative view on recursion by studying the contribution of associative and working memory processes. After an intensive paired-associate training with visual shapes, we observed that baboons spontaneously ordered their responses in keeping with a recursive, centre-embedded structure. This result suggests that the human ability for recursion might partly if not entirely originate from fundamental processing cons…

The self-organizing consciousness as an alternative model of the mind

Through the concept of self-organizing consciousness (SOC), we posit that the dynamic of the mind stems from the recurrent interplay between the properties of conscious experiences and the properties of the world, hence making it unnecessary to postulate the existence of an unconscious mental level. In contrast, arguments are provided by commentators for the need for a functional level of organization located between the neural and the conscious. Other commentaries challenge us concerning the ability of our model to account for specific phenomena in the domains of language, reasoning, incubation, and creativity. The possibility of unconscious semantic access and other alleged instances of a…

Ventilatory conditioning by self-stimulation in rats: A pilot study

International audience; This article describes an experimental attempt to condition breathing pattern in rats. In this experiment, a freely moving rat was first rewarded by an electrical stimulation of the medial forebrain bundle whenever inspiratory duration (TI) exceeded 300 ms. A bidirectional control was then used: TIs longer than 400 ms were rewarded, and then TIs shorter than 300 ms were rewarded. The frequency of TIs longer than 300 ms increased when this event was rewarded, further increased when TIs above 400 ms were rewarded, and decreased during reversal conditioning (TI < 300 ms). At the beginning of the experiment, stimulation caused increased arousal and motor activity, but af…

Implicit Motor Learning: towards a new approach

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Implicit learning shapes new conscious percepts and representations

We present here the lineaments of a new account of implicit learning, an account that does not rely on the notion of “implicit knowledge.” In this account, improved performance depends on the action of unconscious mechanisms that structure the phenomenal, conscious experience of the world. This integrative view makes groundless the search for dissociations between conscious and unconscious influences that has been at the core of the research on implicit learning and memory. We contrast this view, on the one hand, to Dienes and Berry’s (1997) proposal, which defines implicit learning by analogy with subliminal perception, and, on the other, to Neal and Hesketh’s (1997) episodic account, in w…

Les interactions entre les traitements de la musique et du langage

International audience; Alors même que la musique et le langage sont deux systèmes qui présentent de prime abord des différences évidentes, ils possèdent, au-delà de ces différences, des similitudes importantes. La musique comme le langage, est un système complexe spécifique à l’être humain, dans lequel des éléments discrets organisés temporellement conduisent à l’émergence de régularités qui peuvent être apprises implicitement par le système cognitif. Ces similitudes ont conduit la recherche en cognition musicale à s’intéresser aux relations entre les traitements de lamusique et du langage, et à étudier si ces deux systèmes partageaient des processus cognitifs et neuronaux communs.

Learning nonadjacent dependencies : No need for algebraic-like computations.

Is it possible to learn the relation between 2 nonadjacent events? M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002) claimed this to be possible, but only in conditions suggesting the involvement of algebraic-like computations. The present article reports simulation studies and experimental data showing that the observations on which Pena et al. grounded their reasoning were flawed by deep methodological inadequacies. When the invalid data are set aside, the available evidence fits exactly with the predictions of a theory relying on ubiquitous associative mechanisms. Because nonadjacent dependencies are frequent in natural language, this reappraisal has far-reaching implications for t…

Feature creation as a byproduct of attentional processing

Attributing the creation of new features to categorization requirements implies that the exemplars displayed are correctly assigned to their category. This constraint limits the scope of Schyns et al.'s proposal to supervised learning. We present data suggesting that this constraint is unwarranted and we argue that feature creation is better thought of as a byproduct of the attentional, on-line processing of incoming information.

Abstraction of covariations in incidental learning and covariation bias

Experiment 1 was devised to distinguish, in a given set of features composing drawn robots, those whose variations were related a priori for participants from those whose variations were a priori independent. In Expt 2, correlations were experimentally induced between a priori-related features for one group of participants (pre-primed group), and between a priori-independent features for another group {arbitrary group), in incidental learning conditions. A subsequent transfer phase revealed that participants' performances were sensitive to experimentally induced correlations in both groups. However, only the performances of the pre-primed group accurately matched the predictions of a statis…

The effect of attentional load on the breathing pattern in children.

Abstract Experiments designed to establish the effects of video games on breathing patterns have led to contradictory results. Several authors reported that video games tended to increase breathing frequency (i.e. to reduce breath duration), whereas others reported the opposite. We postulated that video games contain different psychophysiological components which may have opposite effects on breathing pattern. On the one hand, arousal and emotion may tend to stimulate breathing. On the other, focusing attention on the game may prompt subject to inhibit any movement — including breathing — which might be a potential nuisance variable. The aim of this study was to assess the specific effects …

Implicit motor learning: A reappraisal

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Apprentissage moteur implicite : variations autour d’une tâche de TRS

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Do Dogs Know Related Rates Rather than Optimization?

(2006). Do Dogs Know Related Rates Rather than Optimization? The College Mathematics Journal: Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 16-19.

The exploitation of distributional information in syllable processing

There is now growing evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical regularities embedded into linguistic utterances, but the exact nature of the distributional information to which human performance is sensitive is an issue that has been surprisingly neglected as yet. In order to address this issue, we first propose an overview of some basic measures of association, going from the simple co-occurrence frequency to the normative measure of contingency, rw: We then report an experiment collecting judgments of word-likeness as a function of the relationship between the phonemes composing the rimes (VC). The contingency between Vs and Cs, as assessed by rw; was the best predictor of chi…

Why Untrained Control Groups Provide Invalid Baselines: A Reply to Dienes and Altmann

Dienes and Altmann argue that an untrained control group provides a reliable baseline to measure artificial grammar learning. In this reply, we first provide a fictitious example to demonstrate that this assessment is faulty. We then analyse why this assessment is wrong, and we reiterate the solution proposed in Reber and Perruchet (this issue) for a proper control. Finally, we point out the importance of these methodological principles in the context of implicit learning studies. In their comment, Dienes and Altmann (this issue) raise two main concerns. First, they argue that any difference in classification between an experimental group and an untrained control group reflects the fact tha…

The use of control groups in artificial grammar learning.

Experimenters assume that participants of an experimental group have learned an artificial grammar if they classify test items with significantly higher accuracy than does a control group without training. The validity of such a comparison, however, depends on an additivity assumption: Learning is superimposed on the action of non-specific variables—for example, repetitions of letters, which modulate the performance of the experimental group and the control group to the same extent. In two experiments we were able to show that this additivity assumption does not hold. Grammaticality classifications in control groups without training (Experiments 1 and 2) depended on non-specific features. T…

Conceptual implicit memory: a developmental study.

The widely accepted standpoint that implicit memory emerges earlier in development than explicit memory, and is more stable from childhood to adult age, is based on experimental data essentially collected in perceptual tasks. The present study was aimed at investigating whether these findings still hold when a more conceptual task is used. We compared the performance of children at two age levels (2nd and 4th grades) on a category-exemplar generation task. Results showed that performances of the two groups were comparable when the target items were typical of their categories, as in Experiment 2, and for a subset of the items in Experiment 1. However, the older children outperformed the you…

Implicit Motor Learning in discrete vs. continuous tasks

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Effects of voluntary changes in breathing frequency on respiratory comfort

Previous experiments on voluntary breathing have suggested that spontaneous breathing is partly determined by the minimization of respiratory sensations. However, during instructed breathing, respiratory sensations may be confounded with difficulty in achieving the prescribed pattern. In the present experiment, we tested the hypothesis that the subjective assessment of respiratory comfort and the difficulty in following breathing instructions are closely related. A total of 15 subjects adjusted breathing frequency to prescribed values ranging from 40 to 250% of individual spontaneous levels. Then, they scored the difficulty of this task and the discomfort associated with the target frequenc…

Is an attention-based associative account of adjacent and nonadjacent dependency learning valid?

Pacton and Perruchet (2008) reported that participants who were asked to process adjacent elements located within a sequence of digits learned adjacent dependencies but did not learn nonadjacent dependencies and conversely, participants who were asked to process nonadjacent digits learned nonadjacent dependencies but did not learn adjacent dependencies. In the present study, we showed that when participants were simply asked to read aloud the same sequences of digits, a task demand that did not require the intentional processing of specific elements as in standard statistical learning tasks, only adjacent dependencies were learned. The very same pattern was observed when digits were replace…

Ventilatory responses to imagined exercise.

We studied whether the ventilatory responses to imagined exercise are influenced by automatic processes. Twenty-nine athletes produced mental images of a sport event with successive focus on the environment, the preparation, and the exercise. Mean breathing frequency increased from 15 to 22 breaths/min. Five participants reported having voluntarily controlled breathing, two of them during preparation. Twenty participants reported that their breathing pattern changed during the experiment: 11 participants were unable to correctly report on the direction of changes in frequency, and 13 incorrectly reported changes in amplitude. This finding suggests that these changes were not voluntary in mo…

Learning from Implicit Learning Literature: Comment on Shea, Wulf, Whitacre, and Park (2001)

International audience; In their analysis of complex motor skill learning, Shea, Wulf, Whitacre, and Park (2001) have overlooked one of the most robust conclusions of the experimental studies on implicit learning conducted during the last decade--namely that participants usually learn things that are different from those that the experimenter expected them to learn. We show that the available literature on implicit learning strongly suggests that the improved performance in Shea et al.'s Experiments 1 and 2 (and similar earlier experiments, e.g., Wulf & Schmidt, 1997) was due to the exploitation of regularities in the target pattern different from those on which the postexperimental intervi…

New evidence for chunk-based models in word segmentation.

International audience; : There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables. As an alternative, chunk-based models posit that the sensitivity to statistics results from other processes, whereby many potential chunks are considered as candidate words, then selected as a function of their relevance. These two classes of models have proven to be difficult to dissociate. We propose here a procedure, which lea…

Implicit Learning in Children Is Not Related to Age: Evidence from Drawing Behavior

Three experiments are reported on implicit learning in 432 children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, using a new paradigm ("the neutral parameter procedure") based on drawing behavior. The first two experiments demonstrated that children modified their drawing behavior following specially devised practice in such a way that these modifications could not be viewed as the result of deliberate adaptive strategies. The third experiment showed that these behavioral modifications lasted for at least 1 hr after the training phase. No age-related differences appeared in the experiments. A comparison of children's data with similar adults' data also failed to reveal any age differences. These res…

Children's Implicit Learning of Graphotactic and Morphological Regularities

In French, the transcription of the same sound can be guided by both probabilistic graphotactic constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is more often transcribed ette after -v than after -f) and morphological constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is always transcribed ette when used as a diminutive suffix). Three experiments showed that pseudo-word spellings of 8-to 11-year-old children and adults were influenced by both types of constraints. The influence of graphotactic regularities persisted when reliance on morphological rules was possible, without any falling off as a function of age. This suggests that rules are not abstracted, even after massive amounts of exposure to a rule-based material. These re…

Dissociation between priming and recognition in the expression of sequential knowledge

Exposure to a repeating sequence of target stimuli in a speeded localization task can support both priming of sequence-consistent responses and recognition of sequence components. Here, a task is introduced in which measures of priming and recognition are obtained concurrently, and it is demonstrated that priming of sequence-consistent responses occurs even when test stimuli are not recognized. The results show that sequence knowledge can be expressed in the absence of conscious recognition. However, we also show that this result is consistent with a simple model in which priming and recognition depend on exactly the same underlying memory strength variable.

The learnability of language. Insights from the implicit learning literature

International audience; The issue of the learnability of language contrasts the proposals of Chomsky (e.g. 1965), who claimed that the major part of language mastery involves innate domain-specific structures, to more recent nonnativist approaches, from the usage-based theories to Bayesian models, which contend that language acquisition rests on all-purpose domain-general learning processes. This chapter aims at examining the potential contribution to this issue of the literature on implicit learning, defined as the set of studies addresing the question of how participants learn in incidental conditions when they are faced with complex situations governed by arbitrary rules in laboratory se…

Les automatismes cognitifs

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Do we need algebraic-like computations? A reply to Bonatti, Pena, Nespor, and Mehler (2006).

L. L. Bonatti, M. Pena, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2006) argued that P. Perruchet, M. D. Tyler, N. Galland, and R. Peereman (2004) confused the notions of segmentation and generalization by ignoring the evidence for generalization in M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002). In this reply, the authors reformulate and complement their initial arguments, showing that their way of dealing with segmentation and generalization is not due to confusion or ignorance but rather to the fact that the tests used in Pena et al. make it likely that neither segmentation nor generalization were captured in their experiments. Finally, the authors address the challenge posed by Pena et al. of a…

Does the mastery of center-embedded linguistic structures distinguish humans from nonhuman primates?

In a recentScience article, Fitch and Hauser (2004; hereafter, F&H) claimed to have demonstrated that cotton-top tamarins fail to learn an artificial language produced by a phrase structure grammar (Chomsky, 1957) generating center-embedded sentences, whereas adult humans easily learn such a language. We report an experiment replicating the results of F&H in humans but also showing that subjects learned the language without exploiting in any way the center-embedded structure. When the procedure was modified to make the processing of this structure mandatory, the subjects no longer showed evidence of learning. We propose a simple interpretation for the difference in performance observed in F…

Classic conditioning of the ventilatory responses in rats

Nsegbe, Elise, Guy Vardon, Pierre Perruchet, and Jorge Gallego. Classic conditioning of the ventilatory responses in rats. J. Appl. Physiol. 83(4): 1174–1183, 1997.—Recent authors have stressed the role of conditioning in the control of breathing, but experimental evidence of this role is still sparse and contradictory. To establish that classic conditioning of the ventilatory responses can occur in rats, we performed a controlled experiment in which a 1-min tone [conditioned stimulus (CS)] was paired with a hypercapnic stimulus [8.5% CO2, unconditioned stimulus (US)]. The experimental group ( n = 9) received five paired CS-US presentations, followed by one CS alone to test conditioning. Th…

The advantage of errorless learning for the acquisition of new concepts' labels in alcoholics

BackgroundPrevious findings revealed that the acquisition of new semantic concepts' labels was impaired in uncomplicated alcoholic patients. The use of errorless learning may therefore allow them to improve learning performance. However, the flexibility of the new knowledge and the memory processes involved in errorless learning remain unclear.MethodNew concepts' labels acquisition was examined in 15 alcoholic patients and 15 control participants in an errorless learning condition compared with 19 alcoholic patients and 19 control subjects in a trial-and-error learning condition. The flexibility of the new information was evaluated using different photographs from those used in the learning…

Implicit learning, development, and education

International audience; The present chapter focuses on implicit learning processes, and aims at showing that these processes could be used to design new methods of education or reeducation. After a brief definition of what we intend by implicit learning, we will show that these processes operate efficiently in development, from infancy to aging. Then, we will discuss the question of their resistance to neurological or psychiatric diseases. Finally, in a last section, we will comment on their potential use within an applied perspective.

The formation of structurally relevant units in artificial grammar learning

A total of 78 adult participants were asked to read a sample of strings generated by a finite state grammar and, immediately after reading each string, to mark the natural segmentation positions with a slash bar. They repeated the same task after a phase of familiarization with the material, which consisted, depending on the group involved, of learning items by rote, performing a short term matching task, or searching for the rules of the grammar. Participants formed the same number of cognitive units before and after the training phase, thus indicating that they did not tend to form increasingly large units. However, the number of different units reliably decreased, whatever the task that…

Automatismes (Acquisition des)

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The emergence of explicit knowledge during the early phase of learning in sequential reaction time tasks

Five experiments investigated the formation of explicit knowledge of a repeating sequence in a sequential reaction time task. Reliable explicit knowledge was obtained even though various conditions prevented the selective improvement of RTs (Exps. 1–4). This knowledge emerged early during training. Participants were able to recognize segments of the sequence (Exps. 3 and 4) or correctly assess the probabilities of transition of the target between successive locations (Exp. 5) after only two blocks of training trials. These findings rule out an interpretation of sequence learning that posits that explicit knowledge emerges from implicit knowledge during the course of training. Although these…

Do distractors interfere with memory for study pairs in associative recognition?

In an associative recognition task, distractors generally consist of a rearrangement of the items composing the study pairs. This makes it possible that processing the distractors generates retroactive interference on memory for the study pairs. In Experiment 1, we explored this possibility in a yes/no recognition test concerning previously learned arbitrary associations between visual symbols and auditory syllables. Rearranged pairs had a deleterious impact on the accuracy and the speed of responses to related correct pairs. This effect did not vary as a function of the number of training blocks, and furthermore, in Experiment 2, the same effect was observed for overlearned small multiplic…

Implicit learning of non-local musical rules : A comment on Kuhn and Dienes

International audience; 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 t…

Is there an implicit level of representation?

A role for backward transitional probabilities in word segmentation?

A number of studies have shown that people exploit transitional probabilities between successive syllables to segment a stream of artificial continuous speech into words. It is often assumed that what is actually exploited are the forward transitional probabilities (given XY, the probability that X will be followed by Y ), even though the backward transitional probabilities (the probability that Y has been preceded by X) were equally informative about word structure in the languages involved in those studies. In two experiments, we showed that participants were able to learn the words from an artificial speech stream when the only available cues were the backward transitional probabilities.…

Mood congruence effect in explicit and implicit memory tasks: a comparison between depressed patients, schizophrenic patients and controls

Summary This study investigates mood congruence effect in explicit and implicit memory tasks in 23 inpatients fulfilling DSM-III-R criteria for major depressive disorder. Performances were compared to those of 15 in- or outpatients fulfilling DSM-III-R criteria for schizophrenia, and 37 normal subjects serving as euthymics controls. All subjects were submitted to a standard cued recall test and to a word stem completion test devised to assess the effect of the initial presentation without the explicit retrieval of the words being necessary. The material used for these two tasks consisted of emotionally negative and positive words. The results show a mood congruence effect in the ```implicit…

Mémoire et apprentissage

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The self-organizing consciousness

We propose that the isomorphism generally observed between the representations composing our momentary phenomenal experience and the structure of the world is the end-product of a progressive organization that emerges thanks to elementary associative processes that take our conscious representations themselves as the stuff on which they operate, a thesis that we summarize in the concept of Self-Organizing Consciousness (SOC).

Implicit learning and statistical learning: one phenomenon, two approaches.

The domain-general learning mechanisms elicited in incidental learning situations are of potential interest in many research fields, including language acquisition, object knowledge formation and motor learning. They have been the focus of studies on implicit learning for nearly 40 years. Stemming from a different research tradition, studies on statistical learning carried out in the past 10 years after the seminal studies by Saffran and collaborators, appear to be closely related, and the similarity between the two approaches is strengthened further by their recent evolution. However, implicit learning and statistical learning research favor different interpretations, focusing on the forma…

What about unconscious processing during the test?

The influence of temporal factors on automatic priming and conscious expectancy in a simple reaction time task.

In a previous study, we reported a dissociation between subjective expectancy and motor behaviour in a simple associative learning task (Perruchet, Cleeremans, &amp; Destrebecqz, 2006). According to previous conditioning studies (Clark, Manns, &amp; Squire, 2001), this dissociation is observed when the to-be-associated events coterminate and thus overlap in time (a training regimen called delay conditioning), but not when they are separated by a temporal delay (trace conditioning). In this latter situation indeed, there tends to be a direct relationship between subjective expectancy and behaviour. In this study, we further investigated this issue in a series of experiments where conscious …