Two experiments investigated the effect of prior knowledge on implicit and explicit learning. Implicit as opposed to explicit learning is sometimes characterized as unselective or purely statistical. During training, one group of participants was presented with category exemplars whose features could be tied together by integrative knowledge, whereas another group saw category exemplars with unrelated feature combinations. Half of the participants in each group learned these categories under a secondary-task condition (meant to discourage explicit learning), and the remaining half performed the categorization task under a single-task condition (meant to favour explicit learning). In a test phase, participants classified only the individual features of the training exemplars. Secondary- as opposed to single-task conditions impaired explicit but not implicit knowledge (as determined by subjective measures). Importantly, prior knowledge resulted in increased amounts of both implicit and explicit knowledge.

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Previous research on food-related attentional bias (FAB) in non-clinical populations is limited. A well-documented result is that higher levels of restraint (i.e. Permanent repository linkattempts to limit food intake) are associated with greater FAB. However, the compellingness of this finding is reduced by methodological limitations. Most of the studies we identified (see Table 1) have measured restraint using the Restraint Scale; a scale that confounds restraint with disinhibition (i.e. tendency to overeat, Van Strien, 1997). Of the four studies that employed alternative measures of restraint, only one (Green & Rogers, 1993), found a main effect of restraint on FAB. An additional problem with work in this area is that it has been almost exclusively conducted with females from western societies. Given societal pressures on western females to be slim (e.g., Cogan, Bhalla, SefaDedeh, & Rothblum, 1996), it seems likely that women who are more inclined to overeat may also be more likely to attempt to limit their food intake, resulting in correlations between disinhibition and restraint. These limitations raise the question of whether it is restraint that is associated with increased FAB or tendency to overeat. Food-related attentional bias 4 -------------INSERT TABLE 1 HERE-----------------We sought to address these shortcomings, by including in our sample individuals displaying high disinhibition/low restraint and vice versa. This was achieved by recruiting males and females in the UK, Greece, and Iran, since there is evidence to indicate that men and non-western women are less subject to pressures to be slim (e.g., Cogan et al., 1996;Wardle et al., 1992 hunger scale. The latter was included to control for hunger biases; none were identified (up to two-way interactions). ResultsFor each participant we computed: a FAB score, by subtracting the (overall) time it took to read the neutral words from the time it took to read the food words; BMI;DEBQ scores (ranging from 1 to 5) for restraint and disinhibition (Van Strien et al., 1986; the latter was computed by taking the mean of the emotional and external eating subscales).Thirty-one participants indicated that they were dieting to lose weight (Britain=6 females, 4 males; Greece=7 females, 2 males; Iran=9 females, 3 males).We first consider results from the 193 participants who were not dieting. One participant (British, female) scored greater than 3.5sds from the mean on the Stroop and was also excluded leaving 192 participants. No participant's error rate exceeded 5%. The correlation between BMI and FAB was non-significant (r = .11). We next extended our analyses to include participants who were dieting. In this instance we excluded those who reported dieting but scored under 3 on the restraint scale (eliminating six participants; these were taken to be spurious responses)and those who exceeded 3.5sds from the mean of FAB (eliminating two partic...

Metaknowledge criteria, Verbal reports, Implicit knowledge, Explicit knowledge, Consciousness, Subjective measures, Concepts,

We examined the learning process with 3 sets of stimuli that have identical symbolic structure but differ in appearance (meaningless letter strings, arrangements of geometric shapes, and sequences of cities). One hypothesis is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity in the same way, largely regardless of appearance. Another is that different types of stimuli bias the learning process to operate in different ways. Using the experimental paradigm of artificial grammar learning, we provided a preliminary test of these hypotheses. In Experiments 1 and 2 we measured performance in terms of grammaticality and found no difference across the 3 sets of stimuli. In Experiment 3 we analyzed performance in terms of both grammaticality and chunk strength. Again we found no differences in performance. Our tentative conclusion is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity independent of stimulus appearance.

The present work explores the unconscious and/or conscious nature of learning attractive faces of same and opposite sex, that is, of stimuli that experimental and neuroimaging research has shown to be rewarding and thus highly motivating. To this end, we examined performance of men and women while classifying strings of average and attractive faces for grammaticality in the experimental task of artificial grammar learning (AGL), which reflects both conscious and unconscious processes. Subjective measures were used to assess participants’ conscious and unconscious knowledge. It was found that female attractiveness impaired performance in male participants. In particular, male participants demonstrated the lowest accuracy while classifying beautiful faces of women. Conversely, female attractiveness facilitated performance in female participants. The pattern was similar for conscious and unconscious knowledge. Presumably, objects with high incentive salience, as are beautiful faces, captured resources, which were used in task relevant versus task irrelevant ways by women versus men. The present findings shed light on the relation of conscious and unconscious processing with affective and reward-related stimuli, as well as on gender differences underlying this relation.

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