Abstract
Repeated sequences are implicitly learned; they facilitate responses to a target. We investigated whether implicit learning of a sequence’s location and identity depends on two different tasks (identity-related and location-related) by using the spatiotemporal contextual cueing paradigm. This paradigm involves having objects sequentially presented at multiple fixed locations. Participants were asked to respond to a target among a stream of distractors presented sequentially at different locations. The target was defined as an object belonging to a different category (Experiment 1: identity-related task) or having a spatial offset (Experiment 2: location-related task). In Experiment 1, object identities were selectively learned, whereas in Experiment 2, object locations were selectively learned. Participants did not recognize the invariant sequences in either experiment. These results suggest that the task set plays an important role in deciding which information is implicitly learned.
