On consciousness in syntactic learning and judgment: A reply to Reber, Allen, and Regan.

Abstract

In this article we examine Reber, Allen, and Regan's (1985) commentary on our analysis of consciousness and abstraction in a case of syntactical learning and judgment (Dulany, Carlson, & Dewey, 1984). We reject their methodological criticism; it is not recall, but assessment at the moment of judgment, that maximizes the validity of reports of rules in consciousness at many moments of judgment. Furthermore, as our computer simulations show, if subjects' reports were merely guessed justifications of unconsciously controlled judgments, the obtained relation of rules to judgments is an event so deviant as to be expected about once in 10 billion occasions. In addition, we discuss a number of broader issues raised by our analysis and their response: judgment after early learning and after automatization, correlated grammars and consciousness, the scope and mental abstractness of rules, conscious and unconscious control, and intuition. Although Reber et al. raise questions that should be examined, we find no reason to revise the interpretation of our experiment.

Dissociating Explicit and Implicit Category Knowledge with fMRI

“…The character of the debate over awareness was similar in several related research areas. After an initial report in which healthy participants exhibited learning while reporting that they were unaware of what they had learned (e.g., Nissen & Bullemer, 1987;Reber, 1967), subsequent research suggested other methods of interrogating awareness that seemed to reveal some conscious knowledge (e.g., Perruchet & Amorim, 1992;Dulany, Carlson, & Dewey, 1985). Resolving this issue appeared to depend on proving ''null awareness'' of acquired knowledge in healthy participants, which is clearly a daunting proposition (Merikle, 1994).…”

Unconscious knowledge: A survey

“…Though their experimental results roughly replicated Reber’s, they concluded that implicitly instructed subjects showed no more learning than those explicitly instructed; moreover, according to them, the learning verified in the former could be accounted for by the subjects’ consciously learning the rules, namely by acquiring correlated grammars. A controversy ensued over methodology rather than over the distinction between conscious and unconscious knowledge (Brody, 1989; Dulany, Carlson, & Dewey, 1985; Reber, Allen, & Regan, 1985). …”

Implicit learning of semantic category sequences: Response-independent acquisition of abstract sequential regularities.

“…For instance, in a typical artificial grammar learning experiment, participants may judge the grammaticality of novel symbol strings on the basis of their similarity to stored exemplar strings or on the basis of the "chunk overlap" between training and test strings (e.g., Dulany, Carlson, & Dewey, 1985;Knowlton & Squire, 1994;Meulemans & van der Linden, 1997;Perruchet & Pacteau, 1990;Vokey & Brooks, 1992).…”