We show that people can implicitly learn short sequences of which they cannot see the constituting elements. This shows both that sequence learning can be implicit (it can't be explicit if people don't even see the sequence material), and that subliminal stimuli can be processed more extensively than previously thought.
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.
Reference
Atas, A., Faivre, N., Timmermans, B., Cleeremans, A., & Kouider S. (2014). Nonconscious learning from crowded sequences. Psychological Science, 25(1), 113–119