Timing Rules Of Implicit Learning Research

Temporal information resides implicitly in the world抯 movement Human has no organs toperceive it directly, as a result, temporal information is acquired in indirect ways, includingimplicit ways. Although many researchers have noticed this implicit temporal cognition, there arefew empirical study reports about them to date. Therefore, this research employed the serialreaction time task to investigate the possible implicit learning about temporal order rule, as well asto answer some questions about implicit learning such as the chunk knowledge and the relationbetween attention and implicit learning.This research consisted of two experiments. Experiment I set up two difficulty levels tosequentially present subjects with four kinds of colored squares which differed only in the colordimension and required them to do choice response according to colors. The sequences wereeither nile-based, pseudorandom or random. Reaction time to key items in rule sequence wascompared with that to key items in pseudorandom sequence. The reaction time difference,subjects?verbal report of nile contents and cued prediction performance were considered togetherto judge whether there appeared implicit learning about those temporal order rules. Experiment2used colored words and figures as two-dimension stimulus and asked subjects to do choiceresponse task according to colors in order to investigate whether subjects can show implicitlearning about the order rule in the second dimension under the attention control condition. Othersettings were similar to those of Experiment 1. The results were as follows:l.subjects can gain implicit learning about the temporal order rule of the first dimension withtheir reaction time to the key item in rule sequences slower than that to the key item inpseudorandom sequences while they were unaware of the contents of rule sequences; moreover,implicit learning can appear under conditions where rule sequences are presented with randomsequences intervened.-3憈4~M i~i * -~i ~III2. The difficulty level has an effect upon the occurring of implicit learning to some extent. Incomparison with rules in sequence without random item intervened, those rules in sequence withrandom item intervened were more difficult to learn. Under the second condition in Expcriment2subjects failed to show implicit learning about this kind of rule.3.When stimuli are two-dimensional, subjects bad difficulties in showing implicit learningaboutthoserulesintheseconddimension.GiventhcresultsofExpcrimentl, itcanbesaidtbatwhether implicit learning requires attention depends upon the complexity of rules and thedimension where they are in.