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Measuring unconscious knowledge: distinguishing structural knowledge and judgment knowledge

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Abstract

This paper investigates the dissociation between conscious and unconscious knowledge in an implicit learning paradigm. Two experiments employing the artificial grammar learning task explored the acquisition of unconscious and conscious knowledge of structure (structural knowledge). Structural knowledge was contrasted to knowledge of whether an item has that structure (judgment knowledge). For both structural and judgment knowledge, conscious awareness was assessed using subjective measures. It was found that unconscious structural knowledge could lead to both conscious and unconscious judgment knowledge. When structural knowledge was unconscious, there was no tendency for judgment knowledge to become more conscious over time. Furthermore, conscious rather than unconscious structural knowledge produced more consistent errors in judgments, was facilitated by instructions to search for rules, and after such instructions was harmed by a secondary task. The dissociations validate the use of these subjective measures of conscious awareness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH, UK

    Zoltán Dienes & Ryan Scott

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  1. Zoltán Dienes
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  2. Ryan Scott
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Correspondence to Zoltán Dienes.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

The training sets include 15 unique strings from the chosen grammar repeated three times in different random orders. The test set includes 30 unique strings from each grammar randomly combined (Table 6).

Table 6 The training and test strings in order of presentation
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Dienes, Z., Scott, R. Measuring unconscious knowledge: distinguishing structural knowledge and judgment knowledge. Psychological Research 69, 338–351 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-004-0208-3

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