Unconscious acquisition of complex procedural knowledge.

Abstract

This research demonstrates a process of acquisition of information about a complex pattern of stimuli and the facilitating influence of this knowledge on subjects' subsequent performance. In two experiments, subjects were exposed for 12 hr to a sequence of frames containing a target, and their task was to search for the target in each frame. The sequence was divided into logical blocks of seven trials each. Locations of the target in the seventh trial of each block were predictable on the basis of the specific sequences of target locations in four out of the previous six trials. Pilot studies and extensive postexperimental interviews indicated that none of the subjects noticed anything even close to the real nature of the manipulation (i.e., the pattern). However, the predicted patterns of latency of their responses to the critical trials indicate that they had, in fact, acquired some intuitive (unconscious) knowledge about how the pattern of prior trials was related to the critical trial. The phenomenon is discussed as a ubiquitous unconscious process involved in the development of both elementary and high-level cognitive skills.

Developing rich and quickly accessed knowledge of an artificial grammar

“…assume that both types of processes operate in nearly all tasks (e.g., Mathews, 1997; see also Reber, 1993;Seger, 1994;Willingham, Nissen, & Bullemer, 1989; but see Lewicki, Czyzewska, & Hoffman, 1987) and, thus, the potential interaction of these processes should be considered.…”

I Like It, but I'm Not Sure Why: Can Evaluative Conditioning Occur without Conscious Awareness?

“…First, humans seem capable of extracting rules governing complex systems (such as artificial grammars) that allow them to perform at better than chance level on tests, yet they cannot verbalise these rules (see Berry & Dienes, 1993 for an extensive review). Second, humans can acquire encoding biases, of which they are unaware, that influence subsequent judgements (Lewicki, 1986;Lewicki, Czyzewska & Hoffman, 1987;Lewicki, Hill & Bizot, 1988;Lewicki, Hill & Czyzewska, 1992; but see Hendrickx, De Houwer, Baeyens, Eelen, & van Avermaet, 1997 for an alternative perspective). Finally, there is evidence that preferences to neutral stimuli can be influenced by both repeated exposure under degraded viewing conditions (KunstWilson & Zajonc, 1980) and priming using subthreshold presentations of positive and negative stimuli (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993).…”

The Role of a Domain-specific Language Mechanism in Learning Natural and Unnatural Stress

“…General cognitive factors include attention, memory (Baddeley 1999, Ellis 2001) and the ability to learn complex rules in nonlinguistic domains, such as visual perception (Lewicki, Czyzewska, & Hoffman, 1987;Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002;Stadler, 1989). The current experiments were designed to separate out the results of a general cognitive learning mechanism from a domain-specific language learning mechanism.…”