State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2013;8(1):e54693. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0054693. Epub 2013 Jan 22.
It is well documented that positive rather than negative moods encourage integrative processing of conscious information. However, the extent to which implicit or unconscious learning can be influenced by affective states remains unclear.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task with sequence structures requiring integration over past trials was adopted to examine the effect of affective states on implicit learning. Music was used to induce and maintain positive and negative affective states. The present study showed that participants in negative rather than positive states learned less of the regularity. Moreover, the knowledge was shown by a Bayesian analysis to be largely unconscious as participants were poor at recognizing the regularity.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The results demonstrated that negative rather than positive affect inhibited implicit learning of complex structures. Our findings help to understand the effects of affective states on unconscious or implicit processing.
有充分的文献证明积极的情绪而非消极的情绪更有利于有意识信息的综合处理。然而,情感状态对无意识或内隐学习的影响程度尚不清楚。
方法/主要发现:本研究采用序列反应时(SRT)任务,该任务具有序列结构,需要对过去的试验进行整合,以检验情感状态对内隐学习的影响。音乐被用来诱发和维持积极和消极的情绪状态。本研究表明,参与者在消极状态下而非积极状态下学习到的规则较少。此外,贝叶斯分析表明,参与者对规则的识别能力很差,这表明他们对规则的认识主要是无意识的。
结论/意义:结果表明,消极情绪而非积极情绪抑制了对复杂结构的内隐学习。我们的研究结果有助于理解情感状态对无意识或内隐加工的影响。