The effects of mood, cognitive style, and cognitive ability on implicit learning

Effects of mood on learning in the serial reaction time task

“…Pretz, Totz and Kaufman (2010) studied the effects of mood, cognitive style and cognitive ability on implicit learning, as measured by both an AGL task and an SRT task. The results showed that a negative mood facilitated performance on the AGL task, and a marginal effect in the same direction was observed on the SRT task.…”

“…The results showed that a negative mood facilitated performance on the AGL task, and a marginal effect in the same direction was observed on the SRT task. Assuming that a negative mood promotes analytical, systematic and detail-oriented, bottom-up processing, Pretz et al (2010) took the significant finding as evidence of learning being less than fully implicit on the AGL task. Instead they suggested that AGL to some extent requires the type of systematic, analytical and bottom-up processing normally associated with more explicit learning.…”

“…Because traditional implicit learning experiments are often monotonous and strenuous they might thus pose activation of different feeling states such as boredom and irritation, which might interfere with the intended mood induction. With both the mood induction manipulation and the mood induction check completed before the actual experimental task, as in the study by Pretz et al (2010), one might therefore run the risk of the intended induction not necessarily lasting throughout the experiment.…”

“…The aforementioned study by Pretz et al (2010), where the effect of mood on the SRT task was only marginally significant, included no measure of participants' ability to apply their sequence knowledge on e.g. a recognition or generation task.…”

“…Mood induction with photographs of happy and sad facial expressions has been shown to be an ecologically valid and socially relevant way of effectively manipulating mood, for instance by Schneider et al (1994). The effect of the mood induction was assessed by the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson & Clark, 1994) at the end of the experiment as opposed to an assessment before the actual experimental task as in Pretz et al's (2010) study. An additional effect of the current applied mood induction procedure is that of increasing perceived task complexity, because the stimulus displays would vary along dimensions such as gender, age and hair colour, in addition to target position.…”