IMPLICIT LEARNING IN THE PSYCHIATRICALLY IMPAIRED.
Item
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Title
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IMPLICIT LEARNING IN THE PSYCHIATRICALLY IMPAIRED.
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Identifier
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AAI8713740
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identifier
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8713740
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Creator
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ABRAMS, MICHAEL.
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Contributor
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Arthur S. Reber
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Date
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1987
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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, Experimental
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Abstract
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The fact that the unconscious acquisition of fundamental information was shown to be robust in the face of psychiatric or neurological illnesses stimulated the question of whether implicit learning is also an unconscious process resistant to such impairments. Four experiments were performed to resolve this issue. Experiments 1-3 studied the learning of a complex grammar, while Experiment 4 studied the learning of a simpler grammar.;The first experiment compared the implicit learning ability of a student group with a group of chronic alcoholics who were patients in a psychiatric facility. The second experiment compared a student group with a group of psychiatric patients suffering from either depression or schizophrenia. The third experiment compared two groups of students: one group was identified as depressed based on an affective inventory; the second group indicated no signs of depression. These three experiments utilized a learning task as a validating measure of impairment.;The results of the first three experiments showed that the psychiatric patients and alcoholics performed much worse in the learning task than both the depressed and non-depressed college students. All groups performed the same in the well-formedness task. The consistency of well-formedness decisions was analyzed by comparing the two judgments each subject made for each letter string used in the tests. This analysis showed that only alcoholics significantly differed from the student groups in that they made more consistent judgments after being informed, during the learning phase of the experiment, that the strings they were observing were constructed based on a grammar.;The fourth experiment compared the ability of a student group with that of a psychiatric group to implicitly learn a simpler rule system. This experiment was based on the premise that if the complex rules in the previous three experiments were induced unconsciously, then simpler rules, which are consciously accessible, should result in impaired populations having relative learning deficits. The results showed this to be the case. The psychiatric group performed below chance and significantly worse than the student group in both the rule judgement task and the learning task.;Therefore, it appears that implicit learning is a robust process that is only minimally mediated by conscious or effortful cognition. Neither minor affective disorders, nor major psychiatric disorders diminish the ability to implicitly learn.;The evidence presented in these experiments also demonstrates that implicit learning is largely an unconscious process. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).
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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
