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Abstract:
Studies of procedural sequence learning are complicated by
difficulties in determining the extent to which declarative pattern
knowledge has developed. Adequate measures of conscious knowledge
are necessary for increasing confidence that any other observed
learning is implicit in nature. This study evaluated a new measure
of conscious sequence knowledge. Participants performed six
sessions of an alternating serial response time task under either
incidental or intentional instructions. Thus, while the former
subjects were not informed of the presence of the pattern, the
latter subjects were told the structure of the pattern embedded in
the task and were asked to guess the pattern at the end of every
block. At the end of every session, participants performed a
production task and completed verbal questionnaires designed to
probe for declarative knowledge. Then, at the end of the final
session, they completed a sorting task in which they classified
strings of spatial positions into frequency categories. Subjects
who had demonstrated declarative knowledge on their end-of-block
guesses sorted the cards into the three categories differently than
those who had not. These results were consistent with performance
on the production task as well. Thus, the sorting task provides a
new measure of declarative knowledge that, together with verbal
reports, can help differentiate between those with and those
without conscious knowledge.
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