Reward driven learning of associative-rules in the absence of awareness

P. BARTTFELD. I. JOURDAN, A.. YORIO, B. S. ZANUTTO, A. R. SEITZ

EEUU

Congreso; Neuroscience 2007; 2007

Society for Neuroscience

The mechanisms and bounds of implicit learning are issues of great interest in the behavioral and brain sciences. Here we provide the first evidence not only that human subjects can learn arbitrary relationships to subliminally presented stimuli, but additionally that this learning occurs at a level of processing that incorporates semantic information and shows rule-like properties (such as transitivity and symmetry). We demonstrate this by use of an operantly learned match to sample task in which subjects had to explore the relation between simple shape and letter stimuli. Subjects were provided positive feedback for correct responses, however, unbeknownst to them, there was no rule linking the shapes and letters but, instead, rules linked the shapes with subliminally primed words. We found that subjects quickly developed patterns of response times in which correct responses (as determined by the rule linking the subliminal prime and the figures) were significantly faster than those of incorrect ones. Variations of this protocol demonstrate that subjects can learn without awareness tasks of semantic access, transitive inference and symmetry; tasks often used to characterize higher order cognition. In addition to the behavioral results, preliminary results from EEG recorded during these tasks will be discussed. These results extend implicit learning mechanisms to an area thought to be the exclusive domain of explicit cognition and raise the question of whether all rule learning is performed first implicitly and our explicit knowledge of these rules comes after.