Can unconscious structural knowledge be strategically controlled?

Norman, Elisabeth; Scott, R. B. Y.; Price, M. C.; Jones, Emma; Dienes, Zoltán

doi:10.4324/9781315628905-7

Cited by 14 publications

(37 citation statements)

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“…Thus, it is unwarranted to assume that if participants learn bigrams and trigrams, learning is, ipso facto, conscious. In the same vein, all previous AGL studies that have used the very same grammars and the very same acquisition and test strings that we used, consistently found evidence for implicit learning (Dienes et al, 1995;Wan, Dienes, & Fu, 2008;Norman, Price, & Jones, 2011;Norman et al, 2016Norman et al, , 2019. Finally, we conducted additional (non-preregistered) analyses on our data which show that, while liking is indeed predicted by bigrams and trigrams, it is also predicted by more complex and abstract types of knowledge, which are, presumably, more difficult to be consciously detected (see Supplementary B).…”

Section: Limitationssupporting

confidence: 79%

“…Thus, it is unwarranted to assume that if participants learn bigrams and trigrams, learning is, ipso facto, conscious. In the same vein, all previous AGL studies that have used the very same grammars and the very same acquisition and test strings that we used consistently found evidence for implicit learning (Dienes et al, 1995;Norman, Price, & Jones, 2011;Norman et al, 2016;Norman, Scott, Price, Jones, & Dienes, 2019;Wan, Dienes, & Fu, 2008). Finally, we conducted additional (nonpreregistered) analyses on our data, which showed that, al- This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

Section: Limitationssupporting

confidence: 57%

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Evaluative conditioning of artificial grammars: Evidence that subjectively-unconscious structures bias affective evaluations of novel stimuli.

Jurchiș¹,

Costea²,

Dienes³

et al. 2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to the acquisition of emotional valence by an initially-neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus; CS), after being paired with an emotional stimulus (unconditioned stimulus; US). An important issue regards whether, when participants are unaware of the CS-US contingency, the affective valence can generalize to new stimuli that share similarities with the CS. Previous studies have shown that generalization of EC effects appears only when participants are aware of the contingencies, but we suggest that this is because (a) the contingencies typically used in these studies are salient and easy to detect consciously, and (b) the performance-based measures of awareness (so-called "objective measures"), typically used in these studies, tend to overestimate the amount of available conscious knowledge. We report a preregistered study in which participants (N = 217) were exposed to letter strings generated from two complex artificial grammars that are difficult to decipher consciously. Stimuli from one grammar were paired with positive USs, while those from the other grammar were paired with negative USs. Subsequently, participants evaluated new, previously-unseen, stimuli from the positively-conditioned grammar more positively than new stimuli from the negatively-conditioned grammar. Importantly, this effect appeared even when trial-by-trial subjective measures indicated lack of relevant conscious knowledge. We provide evidence for the generalization of EC effects even without subjective awareness of the structures that enable those generalizations.

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Section: Limitationssupporting

confidence: 79%

“…Thus, it is unwarranted to assume that if participants learn bigrams and trigrams, learning is, ipso facto, conscious. In the same vein, all previous AGL studies that have used the very same grammars and the very same acquisition and test strings that we used consistently found evidence for implicit learning (Dienes et al, 1995;Norman, Price, & Jones, 2011;Norman et al, 2016;Norman, Scott, Price, Jones, & Dienes, 2019;Wan, Dienes, & Fu, 2008). Finally, we conducted additional (nonpreregistered) analyses on our data, which showed that, al- This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

Section: Limitationssupporting

confidence: 57%

Evaluative conditioning of artificial grammars: Evidence that subjectively-unconscious structures bias affective evaluations of novel stimuli.

Jurchiș¹,

Costea²,

Dienes³

et al. 2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…First, the intention to respond hypnotically at all (White, 1941), which may be conscious (but not need be), and second the specific intention used for a specific suggestion, for example, “arm rise!”, which must be unconscious for the experience to be hypnotic. Although to some authors, “strategic” is ipso facto “conscious” (e.g., Jacoby, Lindsay, & Toth, 1992), there is evidence that strategic control can be implemented without being aware of relevant mental states (e.g., Dienes, Altmann, Kwan, & Goode, 1995; Lau & Passingham, 2007; Norman, Scott, Price, Jones, & Dienes, 2019; Van Gaal, Ridderinkhof, Scholte, & Lamme, 2010). On this basis, a highly hypnotizable could consciously try to have a hypnotic experience, but not know how they achieved it—for example, because the intention implementing the strategy was itself unconscious.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Intentional binding as Bayesian cue combination: Testing predictions with trait individual differences.

Lush¹,

Roseboom²,

Cleeremans³

et al. 2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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We investigated differences in intentional binding in high and low hypnotisable groups to explore two questions relating to (i) trait differences in the availability of motor intentions to metacognitive processes and (ii) a proposed cue combination model of binding. An experience of involuntariness is central to hypnotic responding, and may arise from strategically being unaware of one's intentions. Trait differences in the ability to respond to hypnotic suggestion may reflect differing levels of access to motor intentions. Intentional binding refers to the subjective compression of the time between an action and its outcome, indicated by a forward shift in the judged time of an action toward its outcome (action binding) and the backward shift of an outcome toward a causal action (outcome binding). Intentional binding is sensitive to intentional action without requiring explicit reflection upon agency. One way of explaining the sensitivity of intentional binding is to see it as a simple case of multisensory cue combination in which awareness of intentions increases knowledge of the timing of actions. Here we present results consistent with such a mechanism. In a contingent presentation of action and outcome events, low hypnotisables had more precise timing judgements of actions and also showed weaker action binding than highs. These results support the theory that trait hypnotisability is related to access to information related to motor intentions, and that intentional binding reflects the Bayesian combination of crossmodal cues.

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“…Specifically, in PDP, participants give what they consider to be the optimal response by either: knowing the rule and/or remembering similar training instances (i.e., conscious structural knowledge) or, by having a subjective feeling of intuition and/or guessing (i.e., unconscious structural knowledge). Numerous studies found that unconscious structural knowledge allows the intentional control of the conscious judgement knowledge (Dienes & Scott, 2005;Fu et al, 2010;Norman et al, 2019;Wan et al, 2008). Therefore, we also regard the case in which participants exhibit control over Judgement knowledge when relying on implicit structural knowledge as evidence of IL in our task.…”

Section: Was Learning Implicit?mentioning

confidence: 95%

Implicit and explicit learning of socio-emotional information in a dynamic system control task

Costea¹,

Jurchiș²,

Cleeremans³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Unconscious or, implicit learning (IL) is often described as being instrumental to human social functioning. However, most of the available IL tasks have limited external validity; they use surface stimuli that are not socially relevant. Additionally, the way in which participants exchange information within most of the available tasks departs from the way in which information is being exchanged in real-life social situations. In this study, we report the validation of a novel task, inspired from Broadbent et al. (1984), assessing the implicit and explicit learning of socio-emotional information in a dynamic environment. Participants (N=115) interacted with an animated virtual avatar that displayed different levels of emotional facial expressions. Their task was to regulate the avatar’s facial expression to a speciﬁed level. Unknown to them, the relationship between their inputs and the avatar’s state was mediated by an abstract rule. Results indicate that learning occurred in the task, as participants gradually increased their ability to bring the avatar in the target state. We found evidence for both explicit (consciously knowing the appropriate response) and implicit (knowing the correct responses even when based on subjectively defined unconscious mental states) knowledge acquisition. This is one of the first studies to propose a task for studying the role of IL in interactive social situations. Implications for future research are discussed.

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Can unconscious structural knowledge be strategically controlled?

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Evaluative conditioning of artificial grammars: Evidence that subjectively-unconscious structures bias affective evaluations of novel stimuli.

Evaluative conditioning of artificial grammars: Evidence that subjectively-unconscious structures bias affective evaluations of novel stimuli.

Intentional binding as Bayesian cue combination: Testing predictions with trait individual differences.

Implicit and explicit learning of socio-emotional information in a dynamic system control task

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