Replication of Incidental learning of rewards in an AGL-based paradigm
Creators: name: Jurchiș, Răzvan
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: The study is a replication of a study we conducted in July-August 2021, which aimed to find whether participants are able to unconsciously learn and use their knowledge about a structure (an artificial grammar) that predicts rewards. We found then that participants were able to use unconscious knowledge for accurately choosing, in a test phase, the strings from the grammar that brought rewards. As in the original study, using a modified AGL task, we expect that participants will learn to discriminate stimuli that follow a a structure associated with rewards from stimuli that follow a structure that doesn't leads to rewards, even when they have no conscious knowledge of the structures. That is, participants will learn the two grammars and will learn which grammar predicts rewards and which does not, using a cover task, in which they have to memorize each target letter string and recognize which of two new strings is the previously-memorized target string. Participants, will receive rewards when they respond correctly, but, unknown to them only for strings that follow one of two grammars (the rewarded grammar). When they respond correctly for strings from the unrewarded grammar, they receive a neutral feedback. In a subsequent test phase we expect that participants will be able to discriminate strings from the rewarded grammar from strings from the unrewarded grammar, even when they have no conscious knowledge of the grammar. In the present study, we keep the basic rationale and implementation of the previous task, but include some improvements: 1. before the "conditioning" phase, we include a pure grammar learning phase, in which participants see two blocks of grammar A and two of grammar B strings (without any rewards). We expect that in this phase, participants will learn the two grammars, and, consequently, in the conditioning phase, they will more easily associate one grammar with rewards. 2. We include a short (3 question) questionnaire that tests participants' comprehension and memory for the awareness scale. We will exclude participants that make any mistake to the awareness scale. 3. To increase the tasks' sensitivity and statistical power, the test phase will consist of 40 trials, instead of 20 (i.e., each letter string from gr A will be paired with two different strings from gr B and vice versa) 4. We use another set of surface letters (G, K, L, S, N), but the same grammars. 5. We employ, in the Bayesian analyses, a method for correcting for the maximum possible contamination of the measured unconscious knowledge with conscious knowledge (cf Skora et al., 2020, https://psyarxiv.com/p9dgn/). However, if, as in the original study, we find sensitive evidence that conscious knowledge is not more accurate than unconscious knowledge, this correction will be unnecessary (cf Shanks, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1170-y) So, the new stucture of the task will consist of: 1. A grammar-learning phase 2. A conditioning phase (in which strings from one grammar are paired with rewards, strings from the other grammar are paired with a neutral outcome). 3. A test phase - in which participants are presented, on each trial, with a string from the rewarded grammar and a string from the unrewarded grammar, and have to choose the string from the rewarded grammar, in order to win additional rewards.