Performing the unexplainable: Implicit task performance reveals individually reliable sequence learning without explicit knowledge

Daniel J. Sanchez, Eric W. Gobel, Paul J. Reber

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

42 Scopus citations

Abstract

Memory-impaired patients express intact implicit perceptual-motor sequence learning, but it has been difficult to obtain a similarly clear dissociation in healthy participants. When explicit memory is intact, participants acquire some explicit knowledge and performance improvements from implicit learning may be subtle. Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether performance exceeds what could be expected on the basis of the concomitant explicit knowledge. Using a challenging new sequence-learning task, robust implicit learning was found in healthy participants with virtually no associated explicit knowledge. Participants trained on a repeating sequence that was selected randomly from a set of five. On a performance test of all five sequences, performance was best on the trained sequence, and two-thirds of the participants exhibited individually reliable improvement (by chi-square analysis). Participants could not reliably indicate which sequence had been trained by either recognition or recall. Only by expressing their knowledge via performance were participants able to indicate which sequence they had learned.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)790-796
Number of pages7
JournalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review
Volume17
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2010

Funding

The present work was funded in part by an American Psychological Association Diversity Program in Neuroscience Fellowship to D.J.S. and a Training Grant to support Human Cognitive Neuroscience research (T32-NS047987) to E.W.G.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

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