Ryan B. Scott

Knowledge applied to new domains: the unconscious succeeds where the conscious fails

A common view holds that consciousness is needed for knowledge acquired in one domain to be applied in a novel domain. We present evidence for the opposite; where the transfer of knowledge is achieved only in the absence of conscious awareness. Knowledge of artificial grammars was examined where training and testing occurred in different vocabularies or modalities. In all conditions grammaticality judgments attributed to random selection showed above-chance accuracy (60%), while those attributed to conscious decisions did not. Participants also rated each strings familiarity and performed a perceptual task assessing fluency. Familiarity was predicted by repetition structure and was thus related to grammaticality. Fluency, though increasing familiarity, was unrelated to grammaticality. While familiarity predicted all judgments only those attributed to random selection showed a significant additional contribution of grammaticality, deriving primarily from chunk novelty. In knowledge transfer, as in visual perception (Marcel, 1993), the unconscious may outperform the conscious.

Fluency does not express implicit knowledge of artificial grammars

It is commonly held that implicit knowledge expresses itself as fluency. A perceptual clarification task was used to examine the relationship between perceptual processing fluency, subjective familiarity, and grammaticality judgments in a task frequently used to produce implicit knowledge, artificial grammar learning (AGL). Four experiments examined the effects of naturally occurring differences and manipulated differences in perceptual fluency, where decisions were based on a brief exposure to test-strings (during the clarification task only) or normal exposure. When perceptual fluency was not manipulated, it was weakly related to familiarity and grammaticality judgments, but unrelated to grammatical status and hence not a source of accuracy. Counterbalanced grammatical and ungrammatical strings did not differ in perceptual fluency but differed substantially in subjective familiarity. When fluency was manipulated, faster clarifying strings were rated as more familiar and were more often endorsed as grammatical but only where exposure was brief. Results indicate that subjective familiarity derived from a source other than perceptual fluency, is the primary basis for accuracy in AGL. Perceptual fluency is found to be a dumb heuristic influencing responding only in the absence of actual implicit knowledge.

Blind insight: metacognitive discrimination despite chance task performance.

Blindsight and other examples of unconscious knowledge and perception demonstrate dissociations between judgment accuracy and metacognition: Studies reveal that participants’ judgment accuracy can be above chance while their confidence ratings fail to discriminate right from wrong answers. Here, we demonstrated the opposite dissociation: a reliable relationship between confidence and judgment accuracy (demonstrating metacognition) despite judgment accuracy being no better than chance. We evaluated the judgments of 450 participants who completed an AGL task. For each trial, participants decided whether a stimulus conformed to a given set of rules and rated their confidence in that judgment. We identified participants who performed at chance on the discrimination task, utilizing a subset of their responses, and then assessed the accuracy and the confidence-accuracy relationship of their remaining responses. Analyses revealed above-chance metacognition among participants who did not exhibit decision accuracy. This important new phenomenon, which we term blind insight, poses critical challenges to prevailing models of metacognition grounded in signal detection theory.

Prior familiarity with components enhances unconscious learning of relations

The influence of prior familiarity with components on the implicit learning of relations was examined using artificial grammar learning. Prior to training on grammar strings, participants were familiarized with either the novel symbols used to construct the strings or with irrelevant geometric shapes. Participants familiarized with the relevant symbols showed greater accuracy when judging the correctness of new grammar strings. Familiarity with elemental components did not increase conscious awareness of the basis for discriminations (structural knowledge) but increased accuracy even in its absence. The subjective familiarity of test strings predicted grammaticality judgments. However, prior exposure to relevant symbols did not increase overall test string familiarity or reliance on familiarity when making grammaticality judgments. Familiarity with the symbols increased the learning of relations between them (bigrams and trigrams) thus resulting in greater familiarity for grammatical versus ungrammatical strings. The results have important implications for models of implicit learning.

The Metacognitive Role of Familiarity in Artificial Grammar Learning: Transitions from Unconscious to Conscious Knowledge

We present two methods by which people could learn (e.g., artificial grammars): learning by a single updating model that has the function to reflect how reality is (e.g., the standard types of connectionist models in the implicit learning literature), and learning by the use of considering hypotheticals (hypothesis testing). The first method results in unconscious knowledge of the structure of a domain. Such unconscious structural knowledge can lead to conscious knowledge that new items do (or do not) have that structure (“judgment knowledge”). When unconscious structural knowledge produces conscious judgment knowledge, the phenomenology is of intuition, a common phenomenology in implicit learning experiments. We propose a mechanism by which one becomes aware of judgment knowledge, turning feelings of guessing into those of intuition: feedback in calibrating the accuracy of one’s knowledge of the distribution of familiarity of the test strings. Accurate predictions lead to awareness of knowing, that is, to conscious knowledge. Contrary to some popular beliefs, we argue fluency plays little role in either the expression of unconscious structural knowledge or in the formation of conscious judgment knowledge. The individual difference variable Faith in Intuition was not associated with better implicit learning but it was associated with sensitivity to familiarity and the metacognitive processes by which judgment knowledge can be made conscious: that is, by which feelings of intuition are formed.

The Role of Familiarity in Implicit Learning

On the conference circuit it was always an invigorating experience to be ‘Whittlesead,’ as the saying went—to bump into Bruce at coffee, ask him a question, and hear at high speed how the issue interconnected with Bruce’s often insightful take on all the various workings of the mind. Whether or not you agreed with him, or even knew whether you agreed with him, he always provided a fresh view worthy of serious thought.

Synesthetic experiences enhance unconscious learning

Synesthesia is characterized by consistent extra perceptual experiences in response to normal sensory input. Recent studies provide evidence for a specific profile of enhanced memory performance in synesthesia, but focus exclusively on explicit memory paradigms for which the learned content is consciously accessible. In this study, for the first time, we demonstrate with an implicit memory paradigm that synesthetic experiences also enhance memory performance relating to unconscious knowledge.

Subjective measures of implicit knowledge that go beyond confidence: Reply to Overgaard et al.

Overgaard, Timmermans, Sandberg, and Cleeremans (2010) ask if the conscious experience of people in implicit learning experiments can be explored more fully than just confidence ratings allow. We show that confidence ratings play a vital role in such experiments, but are indeed incomplete in themselves: in addition, use of structural knowledge attributions and ratings of fringe feelings like familiarity are important in characterizing the phenomenology of the application of implicit knowledge.

Detecting conscious awareness from involuntary autonomic responses

Can conscious awareness be ascertained from physiological responses alone? We evaluate a novel learning-based procedure permitting detection of conscious awareness without reliance on language comprehension or behavioural responses. The method exploits a situation whereby only consciously detected violations of an expectation alter skin conductance responses (SCRs). Thirty participants listened to sequences of piano notes that, without their being told, predicted a pleasant fanfare or an aversive noise according to an abstract rule. Stimuli were presented without distraction (attended), or while distracted by a visual task to remove awareness of the rule (unattended). A test phase included occasional violations of the rule. Only participants attending the sounds reported awareness of violations and only they showed significantly greater SCR for noise occurring in violation, vs. accordance, with the rule. Our results establish theoretically significant dissociations between conscious and unconscious processing and furnish new opportunities for clinical assessment of residual consciousness in patient populations.

Colour terms affect detection of colour and colour-associated objects suppressed from visual awareness

The idea that language can affect how we see the world continues to create controversy. A potentially important study in this field has shown that when an object is suppressed from visual awareness using continuous flash suppression (a form of binocular rivalry), detection of the object is differently affected by a preceding word prime depending on whether the prime matches or does not match the object. This may suggest that language can affect early stages of vision. We replicated this paradigm and further investigated whether colour terms likewise influence the detection of colours or colour-associated object images suppressed from visual awareness by continuous flash suppression. This method presents rapidly changing visual noise to one eye while the target stimulus is presented to the other. It has been shown to delay conscious perception of a target for up to several minutes. In Experiment 1 we presented greyscale photos of objects. They were either preceded by a congruent object label, an incongruent label, or white noise. Detection sensitivity (d’) and hit rates were significantly poorer for suppressed objects preceded by an incongruent label compared to a congruent label or noise. In Experiment 2, targets were coloured discs preceded by a colour term. Detection sensitivity was significantly worse for suppressed colour patches preceded by an incongruent colour term as compared to a congruent term or white noise. In Experiment 3 targets were suppressed greyscale object images preceded by an auditory presentation of a colour term. On congruent trials the colour term matched the object’s stereotypical colour and on incongruent trials the colour term mismatched. Detection sensitivity was significantly poorer on incongruent trials than congruent trials. Overall, these findings suggest that colour terms affect awareness of coloured stimuli and colour- associated objects, and provide new evidence for language-perception interaction in the brain.