Implicit learning in children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders: Exploring the effects of individual differences.

Implicit learning plays an important role in the acquisition of various skills that are often deficient in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study examines the implicit learning ability of children and adolescents with ASD, by comparing it to that of a typical group of peers, using the Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) task. In addition, this study investigates whether the above ability is associated with individual characteristics, namely intelligence quotient (IQ), ASD symptoms severity, and individual perception style (global/holistic or local/focused).

Can we change automatic processes: the influence of social priming on alcohol attentional bias.

The Stroop Effect has been linked to social concept priming, suggesting that the latter may trigger automatic behaviour aligned with the primed concept. This study examined the effects of social priming on alcohol attentional bias, with a sample of mostly light drinkers; it used a social priming task and an alcohol-Stroop test to measure participants' response times (RTs) before and after they had been socially primed. Participants were separated into one of three social priming conditions: Neutral, Alcohol Addiction, and Alcohol Preoccupation.

Facial beauty affects implicit and explicit learning of men and women differently.

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.

Role of prior knowledge in implicit and explicit learning of artificial grammars.

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) performance reflects both implicit and explicit processes and has typically been modeled without incorporating any influence from general world knowledge. Our research provides a systematic investigation of the implicit vs. explicit nature of general knowledge and its interaction with knowledge types investigated by past AGL research (i.

The time course of implicit and explicit concept learning.

The present experiment investigated the development of implicit and explicit knowledge during concept learning. According to Cleeremans and Jiménez (2002), the content of a representation can be conscious only when the representation is of a sufficiently good quality; on this theory, increasing explicit and decreasing implicit knowledge might be expected with training. The view that implicit knowledge arises from compilation of explicit knowledge makes the opposite prediction.

How does prior knowledge affect implicit and explicit concept learning?

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.

Restraint, disinhibition and food-related processing bias.

This study examined associations between restraint, disinhibition and food-related processing bias (FPB, assessed by the emotional Stroop task) in males and females in the UK, Greece and Iran. Results showed high restraint was associated with higher FPB. However, high restrained current dieters showed lower FPB that high restrained non-dieters.

Does stimulus appearance affect learning?

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.