Other fields of interest are implicit learning, neural networks, consciousness, self-consciousness and personality, and artificial intelligence. A general question in research on social cognition, is whether causal attributions are spontaneously inferred when subjects are given information about an event or an action. Research on this topic has shown that dispositional attributions about the actor are spontaneously inferred, that is, without the subject thinking consciously or intentionally about these attributions.
Dispositions refer to stable and general traits of a person.
Circumstantial attributions refer to causal explanations of an event in terms of temporal and specific aspects of the situation or the circumstances. More in general, I am interested in the mechanisms by which people attribute causality to dispositions in one case, whereas to circumstances in another. The question whether situational attributions are spontaneous is important, since little research has been addressed to the subject, which leads to the unfounded assumption that only dispositions are generated spontaneously. When people unconsciously make causal judgments about a situation, this may have further consequences on their judgment and behavior towards important actors in the situation, consequences of which they are, likewise, hardly aware. Simulations on implicit learning of biconditional artificial grammars A significant part of everyday learning occurs incidentally a process typically described as implicit learning.