Implicit Sequence Learning Some Of The Effects Of Experimental Study Of The Factors

Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independent of conscious attempts to learn. Implicit sequence learning is an important format of implicit learning. A systematic research was conducted to test the effects of several factors on the implicit sequence learning, including: (1) the existence or nonexistence of the secondary task, (2) the degrees of difficulty of secondary task, (3) the age ,and (4) sequence structure,.The first experiment investigated the effect of the existence or the nonexistence of the secondary task and the sequence structure on the implicit sequence learning. The participants were the fifth-grade students of elementary school. The second experiment with the tone-counting as the secondary task tested the effect of the attention on the implicit sequence learning, in which the participants were the second-grade students of high school. The last experiment concerned with the relationship between age (11, 14 and 17 years old) and implicit sequence learning. At the same time, in the above three experiments, we all controlled the sequence structure and tested the effect of it on the implicit sequence learning. The results show that:(1) The secondary task reduces the adolescent participants' implicit sequence learning;(2) The learning is unaffected by variation in distractor task difficulty, implying that the implicit learning of such sequence can take place in the presence of attention distraction . The effects of secondary tasks on implicit sequence learning are not because they distracted the attention capacity, but because they disrupted of organization of the items in the sequence.(3) The implicit sequence learning develops with age at the early stage of life, demonstrating that the impilict cognitive process of implicit sequence learning relates to age strongly.(4) The mental mechanism underlying the implicit sequence learning is an pairwise association mechanism, which forms associations between adjacent items.There are many factors that affect the implicit sequence learning, but they act in different degrees and ways. Further research is needed to investigate the characteristics of these factors which may have much more effects on the implicit sequence learning.