IBYME   02675
INSTITUTO DE BIOLOGIA Y MEDICINA EXPERIMENTAL
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
Reinforcement learning of associative-rules in the absence of awareness
Autor/es:
P. BARTTFELD, I. JOURDAN, A. YORIO, B. S. ZANUTTO
Revista:
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Referencias:
Año: 2007
Resumen:
The mechanisms and bounds of implicit learning are issues of great interest in behavioral and brain sciences. Here we provide the fi rstevidence not only that human subjects can learn arbitrary relationships with subliminally presented stimuli, but additionally that thislearning occurs at a level of processing that incorporates semantic information and shows rule-like properties (such as transitivity andsymmetry). We assess this by use of an operantly learned match to sample task in which subjects had to explore the relation betweensimple shape and letter stimuli. Subjects were provided positive feedback for correct responses. However, unbeknownst to them, therewas no rule linking the shapes and letters but, instead, rules linked the shapes with subliminally primed words. We found that subjectsquickly developed patterns of response times in which correct responses (as determined by the rule linking the subliminal prime andthe shapes) were signifi cantly faster than those of incorrect ones. Variations of this protocol suggests that subjects can learn withoutawareness tasks of semantic access, transitive inference and symmetry; tasks often used to characterize higher order cognition. Theseresults extend implicit learning mechanisms to an area thought to be the exclusive domain of explicit cognition and raise the questionof whether all rule learning is performed fi rst implicitly and our explicit knowledge of these rules comes after.