Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Psychol Res. 2021 Jul;85(5):1943-1954. doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01385-2. Epub 2020 Aug 4.
We can sometimes efficiently pick up statistical regularities in our environment in the absence of clear intentions or awareness, a process typically referred to as implicit sequence learning. In the current study, we tried to address the question whether suggesting participants that there is nothing to learn can impact this form of learning. If a priori predictions or intentions to learn are important in guiding implicit learning, we reasoned that suggesting participants that there is nothing to learn in a given context should hamper implicit learning. We introduced participants to random contexts that indicated that there was nothing to learn, either implicitly (i.e., by presenting blocks of random trials in "Experiment 1"), or explicitly (i.e., by explicitly instructing them in "Experiment 2"). Next, in a subsequent learning phase, participants performed an implicit sequence learning task. We found that these implicit or explicit suggestions that 'there was nothing to learn' did not influence the emergence of implicit knowledge in the subsequent learning phase. Although these findings seem consistent with simple associative or Hebbian learning accounts of implicit sequence learning (i.e., not steered by predictions), we discuss potential limitations that should inform future studies on the role of a priori predictions in implicit learning.
我们有时可以在没有明确意图或意识的情况下有效地从环境中提取统计规律，这一过程通常被称为内隐序列学习。在本研究中，我们试图探讨这样一个问题，即暗示参与者没有什么可学习的内容是否会影响这种形式的学习。如果先验预测或学习意图在指导内隐学习中很重要，那么我们认为在特定情境下暗示参与者没有什么可学习的内容会阻碍内隐学习。我们向参与者介绍了随机情境，这些情境暗示没有什么可学习的内容，要么是内隐的（即在“实验 1”中呈现随机试验块），要么是外显的（即在“实验 2”中明确指导他们）。接下来，在随后的学习阶段，参与者进行了内隐序列学习任务。我们发现，这些暗示“没有什么可学习的”的内隐或外显提示并没有影响后续学习阶段内隐知识的出现。尽管这些发现似乎与内隐序列学习的简单联想或赫布学习解释一致（即不受预测指导），但我们讨论了潜在的限制因素，这些因素应告知未来关于先验预测在内隐学习中的作用的研究。
