IMPLICIT PROCESSING - A DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF INSTRUCTIONS, UNDERLYING STRUCTURE AND MATERIALS.
Item
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Title
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IMPLICIT PROCESSING - A DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF INSTRUCTIONS, UNDERLYING STRUCTURE AND MATERIALS.
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Identifier
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AAI8515654
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identifier
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8515654
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Creator
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ROTER, ARMONIT.
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Contributor
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Katherine Nelson
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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Recent research in implicit learning and automatic processing in adults has shown that adults can abstract some knowledge of complex underlying structure from instances of the structure. In the present study two experiments were carried out to learn about implicit processes in children. Implicit processes are inductive cognitive activities which enable humans to abstract complex knowlege from the environment. The knowledge acquired is tacit, that is, it guides the subject's behavior without the subject being necessarily aware of the knowledge and often, of its very existence.;In Experiment 1 adults and children (age 5 to 10) were exposed to exemplars of an artificial grammar composed of geometric shapes and were required to learn these exemplars by reconstructing them from memory. A recognition task was used in order to test whether the subjects acquired some knowledge of the grammar in addition to a specific memory of the learning set.;The performance of all the subjects in the recognition task exhibited definite evidence of some degree of abstraction of the underlying grammar. In addition, there were no significant differences between the adults and the children. These results indicate that for this type of task, children as young as five already possess implicit processes very similar to the processes available to adults.;In Experiment 2 the subjects were children from three age groups (5-7, 9-11, and 12-14). The methodology used was very similar to the methodology of Experiment 1. In addition, three manipulations were carried out to learn more about three issues raised in recent implicit learning research with adults: (1) the effect of predisposition; (2) specific vs. abstract knowledge; and (3) the effect of materials.;The results of Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 in that all three age groups abstracted some knowledge of the underlying grammar and there were no significant age differences. The results of the three manipulations were mixed: (1) it was not possible to ascertain the effect of a change in predisposition; (2) the effect of manipulating the structure in order to compare specific and abstract knowledge was highly significant; (3) the effect of manipulating the materials used in producing the exemplars of the grammar was not strong but was in the expected direction.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
