Implicit learning of what comes when and where within a sequence: The time-course of acquiring serial position-item and item-item associations to represent serial order

摘要

Much research has been conducted aimed at the representations and mechanisms thatenable learning of sequential structures. A central debate concerns the questionwhether item-item associations (i.e., in the sequence A-B-C-D,B comes after A) or associations of itemand serial list position (i.e., B is the second item in thelist) are used to represent serial order. Previously, we showed that in avariant of the implicit serial reaction time task, the sequence representationcontains associations between serial position and item information (Schuck, Gaschler, Keisler, & Frensch,2011). Here, we applied models and research methods from workingmemory research to implicit serial learning to replicate and extend ourfindings. The experiment involved three sessions of sequence learning. Resultssupport the view that participants acquire knowledge about order structure(item-item associations) and about ordinal structure (serial position-itemassociations). Analyses suggest that only the simultaneous use of the two typesof knowledge acquisition can explain learning-related performance increases.Additionally, our results indicate that serial list position information plays arole very early in learning and that inter-item associations increasinglycontrol behavior in later stages.