Learning implicitly to produce avoided behaviours

Category

Journal Article

Authors

Witt, A., Vinter, A.

Year

2011

Title

Learning implicitly to produce avoided behaviours

Journal / book / conference

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Abstract

The literature on repetition processing revealed an intriguing paradox between the particular salience of repetitions, which makes them easy to learn, and a tendency to avoid them when generating sequences. The aim of this experiment was to study the extent to which children can learn to produce these avoided behaviours by means of an artificial grammar paradigm using generation tests with implicit or explicit instructions. The analysis of the control group’s performance confirmed the presence of a spontaneous tendency to avoid generating repetitions. A comparison with chance revealed that the children learned to produce repetitions only in the explicit test but not in the implicit test. However, a comparison with the control group showed that learning nonetheless occurred in the experimental group with the implicit test. The discussion focused on this anti-repetition behavioural bias and how it interacted with the type of information processes elicited by the tests selected for assessing implicit learning effects.

Issue

64

Pages

1173-1186

Keywords

implicit learning, artificial grammar learning, generation test, repetition, control group.

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