DOCUMENTS

  TITLE AUTHOR INSTITUTION DATE ABSTRACT DOWNLOAD
Kick-off Content Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 02  
3mb
Kick-off Cleeremans General Introduction Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 02
2mb

This .pdf file is the general introduction to the project, as presented by Axel Cleeremans at the beginning of the kick-off meeting.

Kick-off Cleeremans 1 Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 02  
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Kick-off Cleeremans 2 Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 02  
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Kick-off Meeting Program Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 02
334kb

The program of the first Kick-off Meeting.

Nonconscious learning from crowded sequences Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 11
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Atas, A., Faivre, N., Timmermans, B., Cleeremans, A., & Kouider, S. (in press). Nonconscious learning from crowded sequences. Psychological Science.


Can people learn complex information without conscious awareness? Implicit learning—learning without awareness of what has been learned—has been the focus of intense investigation over the last 50 years. However, it remains controversial whether complex knowledge can be learned implicitly. In the research reported here, we addressed this challenge by asking participants to differentiate between sequences of symbols they could not perceive consciously. Using an operant-conditioning task, we showed that participants learned to associate distinct sequences of crowded (nondiscriminable) symbols with their respective monetary outcomes (reward or punishment). Overall, our study demonstrates that sensitivity to sequential regularities can arise through the nonconscious temporal integration of perceptual information.

Repeating a strongly masked stimulus increases priming and awareness Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 11
729kb

Atas, A., Vermeiren, A., & Cleeremans, A. (2013). Repeating a strongly masked stimulus increases priming and awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 22, 1422-1430.


Previous studies [Marcel, A. J. (1983). Conscious and unconscious perception: Experiments on visual masking and word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 15(2), 197–237; Wentura, D., & Frings, C. (2005). Repeated masked category primes interfere with related exemplars: New evidence for negative semantic priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(1), 108–120] suggested that repeatedly presenting a masked stimulus improves priming without increasing perceptual awareness. However, neural the- ories of consciousness predict the opposite: Increasing bottom-up strength in such a par- adigm should also result in increasing availability to awareness. Here, we tested this prediction by manipulating the number of repetitions of a strongly masked digit. Our results do not replicate the dissociation observed in previous studies and are instead sug- gestive that repeating an unconscious and attended masked stimulus enables the progres- sive emergence of perceptual awareness.

COOL2 Meeting Program Jan De Houwer UGENT 2013 11  
698kb
COOL2 WP2 Update Tom Beckers KUL 2013 11  
COOL2 Admin Meeting Minutes Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 11

The minutes of the COOL2 Administrative meeting, composed by Tom Beckers.

COOL2 WP7 update Axel Cleeremans ULB 2013 11
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An update on WP7 progress.

The nature of the memory buffer in implicit learning: Learning Chinese tonal symmetries Zoltan Dienes SUSSEX 2013 11

Li, F., Jiang, S., Guo, X., Yang, Z, & Dienes, Z. (2013). The nature of the memory buffer in implicit learning: Learning Chinese tonal symmetries. Consciousness and Cognition 22, 920-930


Previous research has established that people can implicitly learn chunks, which (in terms of formal language theory) do not require a memory buffer to process. The present study explores the implicit learning of nonlocal dependencies generated by higher than finite state grammars, specifically, Chinese tonal retrogrades (i.e. centre embeddings generated from a context-free grammar) and inversions (i.e. cross-serial dependencies generated from a mildly context-sensitive grammar), which do require buffers (for example, last in-first out and first in-first out, respectively). People were asked to listen to and memorize artificial poetry instantiating one of the two grammars; after this training phase, people were informed of the existence of rules and asked to classify new poems, while providing attributions of the basis of their judgments. People acquired unconscious structural knowledge of both tonal retrogrades and inversions. Moreover, inversions were implicitly learnt more easily than retrogrades constraining the nature of the memory buffer in computational models of implicit learning.

COOL2 WP4 update Zoltan Dienes SUSSEX 2013 11  
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COOL2 WP8b update Alain Content ULB 2013 11
3mb

The role of letter category in visual word perception - some background for the future work on learning artificial scripts

COOL2 WP3 update Jan De Houwer UGENT 2013 11  
365kb

COOL

Mechanisms of conscious and unconscious learning

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