Does Stimulus Appearance Affect Learning?

Abstract

We examined the learning process with 3 sets of stimuli that have identical symbolic structure but differ in appearance (meaningless letter strings, arrangements of geometric shapes, and sequences of cities). One hypothesis is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity in the same way, largely regardless of appearance. Another is that different types of stimuli bias the learning process to operate in different ways. Using the experimental paradigm of artificial grammar learning, we provided a preliminary test of these hypotheses. In Experiments 1 and 2 we measured performance in terms of grammaticality and found no difference across the 3 sets of stimuli. In Experiment 3 we analyzed performance in terms of both grammaticality and chunk strength. Again we found no differences in performance. Our tentative conclusion is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity independent of stimulus appearance.

Do children with developmental dyslexia have impairments in implicit learning?

“…It has to be noted at this point that, at least in adult research, there is evidence that performance with such stimuli is equivalent to performance with standard AGL stimuli (Pothos, Chater, & Ziori, 2006; see also, Pothos & Kirk, 2004). The sequences of shapes were composed of between two and five elements.…”

Seeing and hearing in space and time: Effects of modality and presentation rate on implicit statistical learning

“…For instance, Chang and Knowlton (2004) showed that changing the font affected how well participants could learn the statistical patterns in the letter strings, suggesting that their knowledge was at least partly based on stimulus-specific features of the input. On the other hand, Pothos and Bailey (2000) compared AGL for embedded geometric shapes versus geometric shapes presented in sequence, and found no differences (see also , Pothos, Chater, & Ziori, 2006). In sum, the existing data is unclear regarding the specific role that input type and sensory modality play in constraining learning; specifically, how temporal and spatial constraints interact with visual and auditory implicit statistical learning has been relatively unexplored.…”

“… Pothos and Bailey (2001) andPothos et al (2006) did compare visual implicit learning using several different types of presentation formats and found no effects on learning. However, all formats consisted of visual regularities that were spatially distributed; there were no conditions examining temporally distributed regularities or auditory input.…”

Separate influences in learning: Evidence from artificial grammar learning with traumatic brain injury patients

“…First, there is quite a lot of evidence that all learning in AGL takes place in training and not in test (this has been shown, for example, by AGL procedures in which there are two testing blocks; cf. Pothos et al, 2006;Redington & Chater, 1996). Accordingly, AGL can be broadly understood as a categorization task.…”