Is implicit learning spared in amnesia? Rule abstraction and item familiarity in artificial grammar learning.
We examined implicit learning of an artificial grammar in amnesic and control participants. The "biconditional" grammar used to generate study and test strings allows two potential sources of judgements in artificial grammar learning to be unconfounded: participants could either learn the abstract biconditional rules or could learn about the distributional statistics of the surface elements (e.g. bigrams) composing the study items. Test strings varied these two sources orthogonally. We found no evidence of abstract rule learning either in the control or amnesic groups. In contrast, both groups learned about the surface elements and tended to call test strings "grammatical" when they were composed of familiar bigrams. However, this sensitivity to bigram familiarity was significantly reduced in the amnesic compared to the control group. The results challenge the claim that implicit learning is intact in amnesia.
Subdepartment of Clinical Health Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, UK. s.channon@ucl.ac.uk
Shelley
S
Channon
David
D
Shanks
Theresa
T
Johnstone
Kian
K
Vakili
Jasmine
J
Chin
Elizabeth
E
Sinclair
D000647:Amnesia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020915:Korsakoff Syndrome / Q000523:psychology; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011594:Psychometrics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology