Fifth Implicit Learning Seminar

tbc Saturday, June 25, 2016 Axel Cleeremans (Université Libre de Bruxelles): Unconscious associative learning with conscious cues Despite extensive research, the very existence of unconscious learning in humans remains much debated. Skepticism arises chiefly from the difficulty in assessing the level of awareness of the complex associations learned in classical implicit learning paradigms. Here, we show that even simple associations between color and motion direction in random dot kinematograms can be learned unconsciously. On each trial, participants had to report the motion direction of a patch of coloured dots, but unbeknownst to the participants, two out of three possible colors were always associated with a given direction/response, while one was uninformative. We confirmed the lack of awareness of the predictive value of the color-motion associations by using a combination of several recognition and generation tasks administered after the main experiment. In addition, we show that trial-by-trial feedback is necessary for learning to take place, and that both the stimulus-response (motor) and stimulus-stimulus (perceptual) associations were learned. In conclusion, we demonstrate that simple associations between supraliminal stimulus features can be learned in the absence of awareness of the predictive relationships that exist between consciously available cues and subsequent responses, so providing a novel framework to study unconscious learning.