School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Cognition. 2018 Jul;176:131-139. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.018. Epub 2018 Mar 20.
The idea that unconscious input can result in long-term learning or task improvement has been debated for decades, yet there is still little evidence to suggest that learning outside of awareness can produce meaningful changes to decision-making. Here we trained participants using noisy motion stimuli, which require the gradual accumulation of information until a decision can be reached. These stimuli were suppressed from conscious awareness by simultaneously presenting a dynamic dichoptic mask. We show that a short period of training on either a partially or fully suppressed motion stimulus resulted in improved accuracy when tested on a partially suppressed motion stimulus traveling in the orthogonal direction. We found this improvement occurred even when performance on the training task was at chance. Performance gains generalized across motion directions, suggesting that the improvement was the result of changes to the decisional mechanisms rather than perceptual. Interestingly, unconscious learning had a stronger effect on unconscious, compared to conscious decisional accumulation. We further show that a conscious coherent percept is necessary to reap the benefits of unconscious learning. Together, these data suggest that unconscious decisional processing can be improved via training.
无意识输入可以导致长期学习或任务改善的观点已经争论了几十年，但仍然几乎没有证据表明，在无意识状态下的学习可以对决策产生有意义的改变。在这里，我们使用噪声运动刺激来训练参与者，这些刺激需要逐步积累信息，直到可以做出决定。通过同时呈现动态双眼竞争掩蔽，这些刺激被从意识中抑制。我们表明，在部分或完全抑制的运动刺激上进行短时间的训练，当测试者面对沿正交方向运动的部分抑制的运动刺激时，准确性会提高。我们发现，即使在训练任务的表现处于随机水平时，这种提高仍然存在。运动方向上的表现提高具有普遍性，这表明这种改善是决策机制变化的结果，而不是知觉的结果。有趣的是，无意识学习对无意识决策积累的影响比对意识决策积累的影响更大。我们进一步表明，有意识的连贯感知是从无意识学习中获益的必要条件。总之，这些数据表明，通过训练可以改善无意识决策处理。
