Abstract
Some recent evidence has favoured purely response-based implicit representation of sequences in serial reaction time tasks. Three experiments were conducted using serial reaction time tasks featuring four spatial stimuli mapped in categories to two responses. Deviant items from the expected sequence that required the expected response resulted in increased response latencies. The findings demonstrated a stimulus-specific form of representation that operates in the serial reaction time task. No evidence was found to suggest that the stimulus-specific learning was contingent on explicit knowledge of the sequence. Such stimulus-based learning would be congruent with a shortcut within an information-processing framework and, combined with other research findings, suggests that there are multiple loci for learning effects.
Acknowledgments
One of the experiments reported in this paper uses data originally gathered for a doctoral dissertation carried out by Benjamin Clegg and supervised by Michael Posner at the Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene. I would also like to thank Steven Keele, Alice Healy, Peter Frensch, and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.