Learning implicitly to produce avoided behaviours
Category
Journal Article
Authors
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.