Abstract
To investigate whether people can implicitly learn regularities in a social context, we developed a new implicit sequence learning task combining elements from classic false belief and serial reaction time tasks. Participants learned that protagonists were offered flowers at four locations. The protagonists' beliefs concerning the flowers were true or false, depending on their orientation, respectively, toward the scene (so that the flowers could be seen) or away from it. Unbeknown to the participants, there was a fixed belief-related sequence involving three dimensions (identity of the two protagonists, true-false belief orientation held by the protagonists, and flower location as believed by the protagonists). Participants had to indicate as fast as possible where the flowers were located (Experiment 1), or how many flowers were given (Experiment 2) according to the protagonists. Experiment 1 combined perceptual and motor processes (as both the belief-related sequence and motor responses referred to location), whereas Experiment 2 unconfounded the sequence and motor responses, allowing to investigate pure perceptual implicit learning. For reasons of comparison, two non-social conditions were created in Experiment 2 by replacing the protagonists with two non-social objects—colored cameras or shapes. Results revealed significant implicit sequence learning of all belief-related dimensions in Experiment 1, and of true-false belief orientation in Experiment 2, even without a motor confound. Importantly, there were faster reaction times and stronger sequence learning effects in the social than in the non-social conditions. The present findings demonstrate for the first time that people are able to implicitly learn belief-related sequences.
Highlights
In our daily life, we benefit from routine sequences of actions, even when we are relatively unaware of these regularities
The results of one participant were omitted from the analyses because of an excessive error rate (24%), which was identified as an outlier
Perceptual information about the flower’s location believed by protagonists lead to the same motor responses, so that participants may have learned the sequence of flower locations because they were aided by the implicit learning of the parallel motor sequences (Deroost and Soetens, 2006)
Summary
We benefit from routine sequences of actions, even when we are relatively unaware of these regularities. When we learn to ride a bike or drive a car, the crude time-course of simple initial movements evolves gradually into faster and fine-grained sequences, resulting in fluent and skilled movements Quite often, these sequential actions are learned in an implicit manner, so that the resulting knowledge is hard to bring to consciousness. One critical condition for smooth social interactions is understanding the mental state of other people (e.g., beliefs, knowledge, traits etc.), termed “mentalizing” or “Theory of Mind” (ToM; Premack and Woodruff, 1978; for reviews see Van Overwalle, 2009; Schurz et al, 2014; Molenberghs et al, 2016) This requires the understanding that people’s social activities are often driven by what they believe and know. A key test to identify people’s capacity to infer others’ mental states is the false belief task (Wimmer and Perner, 1983; Rubio-Fernández, 2013; Kampis et al, 2017)
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