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

Abstract

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.

Unconscious knowledge of rewards guides instrumental behaviors via conscious judgments

“…This method has been most commonly applied in AGL, where it has shown that participants acquire, not only conscious, but also unconscious (structural) knowledge of the grammars, since they respond accurately when they rely on unconscious structural knowledge (Guess, Intuition, Familiarity) (e.g., Dienes & Scott, 2005;Norman & Price, 2012;Norman et al, 2016Norman et al, , 2019Scott & Dienes, 2008. Similar results with this method have been found in evaluative conditioning (Jurchis et al, 2020;Waroquier et al, 2020), implicit sequence learning (Fu et al, 2012(Fu et al, , 2018Zhang & Liu, 2021), language learning (e.g., Paciorek & Williams, 2015;Zhao et al, 2021), symmetry learning (Jiang et al, 2012;Ling et al, 2018), learning of conjunctive rules (Neil & Higham, 2012, or implicit social learning (Costea, 2018;Costea et al, 2020).…”

Unconscious Knowledge of Rewards Guides Instrumental Behaviors via Conscious Judgments

“…This method has been most commonly applied in AGL, where it has shown that participants acquire, not only conscious, but also unconscious (structural) knowledge of the grammars, since they respond accurately when they rely on unconscious structural knowledge (Guess, Intuition, Familiarity) (e.g., Dienes & Scott, 2005;Norman & Price, 2012;Norman et al, 2016Norman et al, , 2019Scott & Dienes, 2008. Similar results with this method have been found in evaluative conditioning (Jurchis et al, 2020;Waroquier et al, 2020), implicit sequence learning (Fu et al, 2012(Fu et al, , 2018Zhang & Liu, 2021), language learning (e.g., Paciorek & Williams, 2015;Zhao et al, 2021), symmetry learning (Jiang et al, 2012;Ling et al, 2018), learning of conjunctive rules (Neil & Higham, 2012, or implicit social learning (Costea, 2018;Costea et al, 2020).…”