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The visual system possesses a remarkable ability in learning regularities from the environment, even in the absence of the learner’s conscious effort. Here we used a probabilistic contextual cueing paradigm to investigate whether implicit learning and its facilitatory effects are sensitive to the statistical property of such implicit knowledge. Our results showed that search efficiency increased consistently as contextual probabilities increased, and the magnitude of the learning effect also increased slightly with repeated repetitions. Furthermore, even when the total number of exposures was held constant between each probability, the highest probability still enjoyed a greater cuing effect, suggesting that the temporal aspect of implicit learning is also an important factor to consider in addition to the effect of mere frequency. Together, these findings suggest that implicit learning, although bypassing observers' conscious encoding and retrieval effort, behaves much like explicit learning in the sense that its facilitatory effect also varies as a function of its associative strength.
Submissions Open:December 10, 2016
Symposia submissions due:March 1, 2017
Abstract submissions due:April 10, 2017
Authors will be notified of decisions by:May 20-22, 2017
Registration open:May 21, 2017
Conference:September 1-3, 2017