School of Psychology and Cognitive Science and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Conscious Cogn. 2013 Mar;22(1):203-11. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.12.001. Epub 2013 Jan 12.
We demonstrated unconscious learning of task-irrelevant perceptual regularities in a Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task in both visual and auditory domains. Participants were required to respond to different letters ('F' or 'J', experiment 1) or syllables ('can' or 'you', experiment 2) which occurred in random order. Unbeknownst to participants, the color (red, green, blue or yellow) of the two letters or the tone (1-4) of the syllables varied according to certain rules. Reaction times indicated that people indeed learnt both the color and tonal regularities indicating that task-irrelevant sequence structure can be learned perceptually. In a subsequent prediction test of knowledge of the color or tonal cues using subjective measures, we showed that people could acquire task irrelevant knowledge unconsciously.
我们在视觉和听觉领域的序列反应时间 (SRT) 任务中证明了对任务不相关的知觉规则的无意识学习。参与者需要对以随机顺序出现的不同字母（'F' 或 'J'，实验 1）或音节（'can' 或 'you'，实验 2）做出反应。参与者并不知道，两个字母的颜色（红、绿、蓝或黄）或音节的音高（1-4）根据某些规则而变化。反应时间表明，人们确实学习了颜色和音高规律，这表明可以通过感知来学习任务不相关的序列结构。在使用主观测量方法对颜色或音高线索的知识进行后续预测测试中，我们表明人们可以无意识地获得任务无关的知识。
