Visual statistical learning in infancy: Discrimination of fine-grained regularities depends on early test trials.

Infants' ability to detect statistical regularities between visual objects has been demonstrated in previous studies (e.g., Kirkham et al.

Spontaneous eyeblinks are sensitive to sequential learning.

Although sequential learning and spontaneous eyeblink rate (EBR) have both been shown to be tightly related to cerebral dopaminergic activity, they have never been investigated at the same time. In the present study, EBR, taken as an indirect marker of dopaminergic activity, was investigated in two resting state conditions, both before and after visuomotor sequence learning in a serial reaction time task (SRT) and during task practice. Participants' abilities to produce and manipulate their knowledge about the sequential material were probed in a generation task.

Saving the Perruchet effect: A role for the strength of the association in associative learning.

In a partial reinforcement schedule where a cue repeatedly predicts the occurrence of a target in consecutive trials, reaction times to the target tend to decrease in a monotonic fashion, while participants' expectancies for the target decrease at the same time. This dissociation between reaction times and expectancies-the so-called Perruchet effect-challenges the propositional view of learning, which posits that human conditioned responses result from conscious inferences about the relationships between events. However, whether the reaction time pattern reflects the strength of a putative cue-target link, or only non-associative processes, such as motor priming, remains unclear.

Learning the association between a context and a target location in infancy.

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, ; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, ). The present study extends these results by investigating whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented.

Unconscious associative learning with conscious cues.

Despite extensive research, the very existence of unconscious learning in humans remains much debated. Skepticism arises chiefly from the difficulty in assessing the level of awareness of the complex associations learned in classical implicit learning paradigms. Here, we show that simple associations between colors and motion directions can be learned unconsciously.

The reversal of perceptual and motor compatibility effects differs qualitatively between metacontrast and random-line masks.

In masked priming tasks, participants typically respond faster to compatible than to incompatible primes, an effect that has been dubbed as the positive compatibility effect (PCE). However, when the interval between the prime and the mask is relatively long, responses are faster to incompatible than to compatible primes. This inversion is called the negative compatibility effect (NCE).