Retrieval of a well-established skill is resistant to distraction: Evidence from an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task

Vékony, Teodóra; Török, Lilla; Pedraza, Felipe; Schipper, Kate; Plèche, Claire; Tóth, László; Janacsek, Karolina; Németh, Dezső

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0243541

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…This conclusion is in accordance with the findings that statistical knowledge persists and remains resistant to interference even after 1 year ( Kóbor et al. 2017 ), is intact in dual-task conditions ( Vékony et al. 2019 ) or in certain disorders characterized by cognitive dysfunctions, such as obstructive sleep apnea ( Nemeth et al.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Speed or Accuracy Instructions During Skill Learning do not Affect the Acquired Knowledge

Vékony

Marossy

Must

et al. 2020

Cerebral Cortex Communications

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A crucial question in skill learning research is how instruction affects the performance or the underlying representations. Little is known about the effects of instructions on one critical aspect of skill learning, namely, picking-up statistical regularities. More specifically, the present study tests how pre-learning speed or accuracy instructions affect the acquisition of non-adjacent second-order dependencies. We trained two groups of participants on an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task: one group focused on being fast and the other on being accurate. As expected, we detected a strong instruction effect: accuracy instruction resulted in a nearly errorless performance, and speed instruction caused short reaction times. Despite the differences in the average reaction times and accuracy scores, we found a similar level of statistical learning performance in the training phase. After the training phase, we tested the two groups under the same instruction (focusing on both speed and accuracy), and they showed comparable performance, suggesting a similar level of underlying statistical representations. Our findings support that skill learning can result in robust representations, and they highlight that this form of knowledge may appear with almost errorless performance. Moreover, multiple sessions with different instructions enabled the separation of competence from performance.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Speed or Accuracy Instructions During Skill Learning do not Affect the Acquired Knowledge

Vékony

Marossy

Must

et al. 2020

Cerebral Cortex Communications

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“…However, given that at least some of the judgement knowledge was unconscious, we can infer some structural knowledge was too (see Fu et al, 2010). Vékony et al (2020) showed an ASRT task (Alternating Serial Reaction Time task in which every other trial is random) was resistant to a secondary task (counting stimuli) at testing, with evidence of above chance exclusion performance -consistent with the application of unconscious structural knowledge being resistant to effects of diminished executive capacity.…”

Section: Conscious Versus Unconscious Learningmentioning

confidence: 83%

Conscious and unconscious mental states.

Dienes¹,

Seth²

2022

Preprint

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The major theories of consciousness that distinguish conscious from unconscious states can be grouped into two main classes, either higher order or integration theories. There is evidence that different types of mental states can be unconscious, though that conclusion depends on the theory of consciousness assumed. Unconscious memory (in the sense of the influence of a prior event not recollected) can shape perception, liking, and control our behaviour. Subliminal perception can produce semantic priming, guide attention and decision making; and optical variables a person describes incorrectly can guide action. Implicit learning can shape judgments and choices in complex environments. Unconscious intentions can allow people to respond appropriately in goal directed ways, while the person experiences the actions as involuntary. Unconscious attitudes are no more or less plausible than any other mental state being unconscious, but it has been hard to obtain evidence for unconscious attitudes, as distinct from gut reactions one does not agree with.

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“…Serial reaction time tasks of various sorts have been extensively used to assess whether sequence learning can be implicit [1]; developmentally invariant or even superior in children compared to adults [42]; impaired [43], intact [44, 45] or even enhanced [46] in neurological and psychiatric conditions; persistent for months [32] and resistant to distraction [12] even after brief learning; (in)dependent on sleep [33, 47] and subjective sleep quality [48], etc. It would be possible to use the parameterization afforded by models such as the HCRP to ask what components differ significantly between conditions or populations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking human skill learning with a hierarchical Bayesian sequence model

Éltető

Németh

Janacsek

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Humans can implicitly learn complex perceptuo-motor skills over the course of large numbers of trials. This likely depends on our becoming better able to take advantage of ever richer and temporally deeper predictive relationships in the environment. Here, we offer a novel characterization of this process, fitting a non-parametric, hierarchical Bayesian sequence model to the reaction times of human participants' responses over ten sessions, each comprising thousands of trials, in a serial reaction time task involving higher-order dependencies. The model, adapted from the domain of language, forgetfully updates trial-by-trial, and seamlessly combines predictive information from shorter and longer windows onto past events, weighing the windows proportionally to their predictive power. As the model defines a prior over window depths, we were able to determine the extent to which the internal predictions of individual participant depended on how many previous elements. Already in the first session, the model showed that participants had begun to rely on two previous elements (i.e., trigrams), thereby successfully adapting to the most prominent higher-order structure in the task. The extent to which local statistical fluctuations influenced participants' responses waned over subsequent sessions, as subjects forgot the trigrams less and evidenced skilled performance. By the eighth session, a subset of participants shifted their prior further to consider a context deeper than two previous elements. Finally, participants showed resistance to interference and slow forgetting of the old sequence when it was changed in the final sessions. Model parameters for individual subjects covaried appropriately with independent measures of working memory. In sum, the model offers the first principled account of the adaptive complexity and nuanced dynamics of humans' internal sequence representations during long-term implicit skill learning.

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Retrieval of a well-established skill is resistant to distraction: Evidence from an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task

Cited by 14 publications

References 63 publications

Speed or Accuracy Instructions During Skill Learning do not Affect the Acquired Knowledge

Speed or Accuracy Instructions During Skill Learning do not Affect the Acquired Knowledge

Conscious and unconscious mental states.

Tracking human skill learning with a hierarchical Bayesian sequence model

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