Learning implicitly to produce avoided behaviours

Abstract

The literature on repetition processing reveals an intriguing paradox between the particular salience of repetitions, which makes them easy to learn, and a tendency to avoid them when generating sequences. The aim of this experiment was to study the extent to which children can learn to produce these avoided behaviours by means of an artificial grammar paradigm using generation tests with implicit or explicit instructions. The analysis of the control group's performance confirmed the presence of a spontaneous tendency to avoid generating repetitions. A comparison with chance revealed that the children learned to produce repetitions in the explicit test but not in the implicit test. However, a comparison with the control group showed that learning nonetheless occurred in the experimental group with the implicit test. The discussion focused on this antirepetition behavioural bias and how it interacted with the type of information processes elicited by the tests selected for assessing implicit learning effects.

Keywords:

• Implicit learning
• Artificial grammar learning
• Generation test
• Repetition
• Control group

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to Stéphane Argon and Laurent Bergerot, who designed and programmed the video game. We also thank Pierre Perruchet and Paul Molin very much for their valuable help in the programming of the algorithms for computing the theoretical proportions and Tim Pownall for his very careful correction of the English of the manuscript. This research was supported by a grant from the Conseil Régional de Bourgogne.

Notes

¹ It may be worth preventing, at this stage, any possible confusion arising from the use of the term “implicit” to denote either the modes of information acquisition (learning phase) or the modes of information retrieval (test phase) as distinguished by Perlman and Tzelgov (2006). In our view, implicit learning covers all forms of unintentional or incidental or automatic learning. Learning can be assessed by means of tests that use explicit instructions—that is, instructions that explicitly refer to the material seen during training and which ask participants to judge whether items are grammatical or not: for instance, given that the items seen during training are explicitly designated as grammatical (“intentional retrieval” in Perlman & Tzelgov's terminology). However, using a test with explicit instructions introduces doubts about what is being measured: the genuine consequences of the training phase or the results of conscious recollection of information about the training phase? By contrast, implicit instructions are instructions that do not refer to the training phase at all (“incidental” or “automatic retrieval” for Perlman & Tzelgov).