•TDCS boosts neuroplastic mechanisms associated with procedural learning.•Targeting M1 seems promising for implicit motor learning.•Targeting prefrontal areas improves acquisition and retention of ...implicit association and memory.•The cerebellum is emerging as a promising target area of stimulation for both motor and non-motor procedural learning.•tDCS for procedural rehabilitation is at early stages and establishing standardised tDCS protocols is needed to propose effective clinical protocols.
Procedural learning is the acquisition of motor and non-motor skills through a gradual process that increases with practice. Impairments in procedural learning have been consistently demonstrated in neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative, and neuropsychiatric disorders. Considering that noninvasive brain stimulation modulates brain activity and boosts neuroplastic mechanisms, we reviewed the effects of coupling transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) with training methods for motor and non-motor procedural learning to explore tDCS potential use as a tool for enhancing implicit learning in healthy and clinical populations. The review covers tDCS effects over i. motor procedural learning, from basic to complex activities; ii. non-motor procedural learning; iii. procedural rehabilitation in several clinical populations. We conclude that targeting the primary motor cortex and prefrontal areas seems the most promising for motor and non-motor procedural learning, respectively. For procedural rehabilitation, the use of tDCS is yet at an early stage but some effectiveness has been reported for implicit motor and memory learning. Still, systematic comparisons of stimulation parameters and target areas are recommended for maximising the effectiveness of tDCS and its robustness for procedural rehabilitation.
•Observers can detect early affective signals in other's cognitive processing and use them for interpersonal metacognitive monitoring.•Observers can read a learner's confidence in AGL tasks without ...verbal communication.•A novel experimental paradigm for investigating the phenomenon of mindreading during implicit learning is introduced.
This study investigates the observers' ability to monitor the ongoing cognitive processes of a partner who is implicitly learning an artificial grammar. Our hypothesis posits that learners experience metacognitive feelings as they attempt to apply their implicit knowledge, and that observers are capable of detecting and interpreting these feelings as cues of the learner's cognitive state. For instance, learners might encounter affective signals linked to cognitive conflicts and errors at different processing stages, which observers can construe as manifestations of the learner's cognitive dissonance. The research involved 126 participants organized into dyads, with one participant acting as a learner, and the other as an observer. The observer's task was to judge whether the learner agrees with the information presented (consonance judgment) and was limited to reading the learner's nonverbal signals to avoid explicit mindreading. The findings suggest that observers possess mindreading abilities, enabling them to detect both learners' confidence and accuracy in stimuli classification. This extends our understanding of non-verbal mindreading capabilities and indicates that observers can effectively interpret early implicit metacognitive information, even in the absence of explicit self-evaluation from the learners. This research offers significant insights into how individuals interpret others' mental states during implicit learning tasks, particularly in the context of utilizing early affective cues within the Artificial Grammar Learning paradigm.
We comment on a proposal in the target article that draws on “behaviorism” for developing interventions geared at attenuating negative consumer behaviors. One interpretation of this proposal ...emphasizes the influence of stimuli (S) on responses (R) and de‐emphasizes intervening mental processes. We contrast this S–R perspective with an S–O–R perspective that embraces O, the organism (in our context, the consumer) and in doing so attempts to explain and then leverage S–R relations. We discuss in detail that without an organism‐ and theory‐centered perspective of S–R relations, it is difficult to identify relevant stimuli and predict patterns of behavior in new contexts. We illustrate in more depth using Janiszewski and Laran's example of aiding an individual suffering from depression how this theory‐ and organism‐centered perspective can improve possible intervention strategies.
There has been growing interest in assessing computational thinking (CT) across diverse learners beyond the traditional forms of tests and assignments. Learning games offer the potential for ...innovative, stealth assessments of students' implicit learning from gameplay behaviors. This paper reports on the measurement of implicit CT practices demonstrated by upper elementary- and middle-school students as they play the CT learning game Zoombinis. The process of using the gameplay log data to build valid automated detectors of students' implicit CT practices is discussed. Findings from this study provide implications for analyzing gameplay behaviors at scale, leading to the development of models for the assessment of implicit STEM learning.
•Described an emergent approach to the development of game-based learning assessments.•Used data-mining methods to create detectors of students' implicit computational thinking based on gameplay behaviors.•Results showed in-game measures were significantly related to external measures of computational thinking.•Applications of in-game measures as formative computational thinking assessments of teachers and designers.
Implicit learning refers to the incidental acquisition and expression of knowledge that is not accompanied by full awareness of its contents. Implicit sequence learning (ISL) represents one of the ...most useful paradigms to investigate these processes. In this paradigm, participants are usually instructed to respond to the location of a target that moves regularly through a set of possible locations. Although participants are not informed about the existence of a sequence, they eventually learn it implicitly, as attested by the costs observed when this sequence is violated in a reduced set of control trials. Interestingly, the expression of this learning decreases immediately after a control trial, in a way that resembles the adjustments triggered in response to incongruent trials in interference tasks. These effects have been attributed to a control network involving dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and cingulate (ACC) structures. In the present work, we reviewed a group of recent studies which had inhibited DLPFC top-down control by means of non-invasive brain stimulation to increase the acquisition of ISL. In addition, as no previous study has investigated the effect of inhibiting top-down control on releasing the automatic expression of ISL, we present a pre-registered – yet exploratory – study in which an inhibitory continuous theta burst stimulation protocol was applied over an anterior-ventral portion of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) highly interconnected with the ACC, and whose activity has been specifically linked to motor control (i.e., Right DLPFC, n = 10 or the Left DLPFC, n = 10), compared to active Vertex stimulation (n = 10). Contrary to our hypotheses, the results did not show evidence for the involvement of such region in the expression of ISL. We discussed the results in the context of the set of contradictory findings reported in the systematic review.
•At least 10 different measures of human threat conditioning exist in the literature.•Measures are highly variable in translational, cognitive and methodological aspects.•Evidence of the measures ...reflecting amygdala-dependent learning in humans is scarce.•Formal learning models have mostly been studied for skin conductance responses.•Startle eye-blink and pupil size seem to best discriminate CS+/CS−.
Threat conditioning is a laboratory model of associative learning across species that is often used in research on the etiology and treatment of anxiety disorders. At least 10 different conditioned responses (CR) for quantifying learning in human threat conditioning are found in the literature. In this narrative review, we discuss these CR by considering the following questions: (1) Are the CR indicators of amygdala-dependent threat learning? (2) To what components of formal learning models do the CR relate? (3) How well can threat learning be inferred from the CR? Despite a vast literature, these questions can only be answered for some CR. Among the CR considered, heart period, startle eye-blink and Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer are most clearly related to amygdala-dependent threat learning. Formal learning models have mostly been studied for skin conductance responses, which are likely to reflect threat prediction and its uncertainty. Startle eye-blink and pupil size appear to best differentiate CS+/CS−, although few direct comparisons between CR exist. We suggest future directions for improving the quantification of threat conditioning.
Rethinking Attentional Habits Giménez-Fernández, Tamara; Luque, David; Shanks, David R. ...
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
12/2023, Letnik:
32, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Attentional habits acquired by visual statistical learning cause enduring biases toward specific locations. These habits, driven by recent search history, are thought to be independent of both ...goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional mechanisms. This theoretical claim is based on three characteristics that these habits apparently exhibit, that is, they are inflexible, implicit, and efficient. We review methodological limitations in previous studies and briefly describe recent results that challenge this new framework. We conclude that it might be premature to assume that attentional habits are based on a special search history process that differs from the two traditionally recognized attentional mechanisms.
•Perceived descriptive norms are learned in part through incidental exposure to stimulus objects.•Effects of mere incidental exposure on perceived descriptive norms can occur without conscious ...processing.•Perceived descriptive norms and personal preferences are positively associated under the need for connectedness motivation.•Perceived descriptive norms mediate this mere exposure effect on personal preferences.
One type of perceived descriptive norm is representations of how widely known or familiar particular entities (including artifacts, people, groups, ideas and practices, etc.) are in one’s society. These perceptions are implicated in important interpersonal, organizational and cultural processes. The authors hypothesize that these familiarity perceptions are formed in part through mere exposure—things frequently seen are assumed to be widely known. Two experimental studies provided support for this hypothesis and showed that incidental exposure to stimulus objects alters their assumed familiarity to others, without conscious processing. Furthermore, this mere exposure effect affected personal preference only when there was a strong motivation for social connectedness. In contrast, when there was a strong motivation for personal distinctiveness, the mere exposure effect on assumed familiarity to others did not affect personal preference.
The present paper highlights the power of unconscious processes within the framework of implicit learning, a research area that has attracted extensive attention in the past decades. More ...specifically, it discusses theoretical issues concerning this multifaceted type of learning that occurs without conscious awareness and presents various applications in different learning settings and research domains, and in varied populations. Another main focus of this review is on recent advances in our understanding of the factors that affect implicit learning, including motives, attention, affective states, and general knowledge. The paper ends with conclusions and general principles drawn from research on a phenomenon with extended applications both in the lab and in everyday life and underlines the necessity for further research that will refine our methods of distinguishing conscious and unconscious processes and provide answers to unresolved issues and contradictory findings.
•Statistical learning consists of two primary neurocognitive mechanisms.•Cortical plasticity results in heightened behavioral facilitation for patterns.•Top-down control of attention can modulate ...learning.•They have different neuroanatomical, developmental, and phylogenetic bases.
Despite a growing body of research devoted to the study of how humans encode environmental patterns, there is still no clear consensus about the nature of the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning statistical learning nor what factors constrain or promote its emergence across individuals, species, and learning situations. Based on a review of research examining the roles of input modality and domain, input structure and complexity, attention, neuroanatomical bases, ontogeny, and phylogeny, ten core principles are proposed. Specifically, there exist two sets of neurocognitive mechanisms underlying statistical learning. First, a “suite” of associative-based, automatic, modality-specific learning mechanisms are mediated by the general principle of cortical plasticity, which results in improved processing and perceptual facilitation of encountered stimuli. Second, an attention-dependent system, mediated by the prefrontal cortex and related attentional and working memory networks, can modulate or gate learning and is necessary in order to learn nonadjacent dependencies and to integrate global patterns across time. This theoretical framework helps clarify conflicting research findings and provides the basis for future empirical and theoretical endeavors.
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