We are examining patterns of brain activation during this transfer phase. We argued that this parallel learning may be the basis of automaticity. When sufficient implicit learning has occurred, explicit learning can simply drop out. We predict that during explicit training, brain areas associated with implicit learning will also be active, reflecting the parallel learning. Click here to read an abstract reporting this work at the 2000 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Subjects see visual stimuli and are asked to press one of four buttons in response to the stimuli.
The trick is that a visual stimulus actually appears very briefly before the stimulus that they are aware of, and this stimulus determines which of the buttons they are to press. Our preliminary data show that people make successively more correct button pushes with training, although they are not aware of these briefly-presented stimuli, which are determining their behavior. This result is interesting because some have argued that arbitrary associations are the province of the hippocampus, which is associated with conscious learning. Typically, conscious, exlicit knowledge of where to move or when to move can be quite helpful to skilled performance. In this project we are administering very simple tasks to patients with frontal lobe damage with or without explicit knowledge to help them, to see whether they are able to use this explicit knowledge to help them.