Suchergebnisse

AbstractImplicit skill learning underlies obtaining not only motor, but also cognitive and social skills through the life of an individual. Yet, the ontogenetic changes in humans' implicit learning abilities have not yet been characterized, and, thus, their role in acquiring new knowledge efficiently during development is unknown. We investigated such learning across the lifespan, between 4 and 85 years of age with an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task, and we found that the difference in implicitly learning high‐ vs. low‐probability events – measured by raw reaction time (RT) – exhibited a rapid decrement around age of 12. Accuracy andz‐transformed data showed partially different developmental curves, suggesting a re‐evaluation of analysis methods in developmental research. The decrement in raw RT differences supports an extension of the traditional two‐stage lifespan skill acquisition model: in addition to a decline above the age 60 reported in earlier studies, sensitivity to raw probabilities and, therefore, acquiring new skills is significantly more effective until early adolescence than later in life. These results suggest that due to developmental changes in early adolescence, implicit skill learning processes undergo a marked shift in weighting raw probabilities vs. more complex interpretations of events, which, with appropriate timing, prove to be an optimal strategy for human skill learning.

Abstract
Characterizing ontogenetic changes across the lifespan is a crucial tool in understanding neurocognitive functions. While age-related changes in learning and memory functions have been extensively characterized in the past decades, the lifespan trajectory of memory consolidation, a critical function that supports the stabilization and long-term retention of memories, is still poorly understood. Here we focus on this fundamental cognitive function and probe the consolidation of procedural memories that underlie cognitive, motor, and social skills and automatic behaviors. We used a lifespan approach: 255 participants aged between 7 and 76 years performed a well-established procedural memory task in the same experimental design across the whole sample. This task enabled us to disentangle two critical processes in the procedural domain: statistical learning and general skill learning. The former is the ability to extract and learn predictable patterns of the environment, while the latter captures a general speed-up as learning progresses due to improved visuomotor coordination and other cognitive processes, independent of acquisition of the predictable patterns. To measure the consolidation of statistical and general skill knowledge, the task was administered in two sessions with a 24-h delay between them. Here, we report successful retention of statistical knowledge with no differences across age groups. For general skill knowledge, offline improvement was observed over the delay period, and the degree of this improvement was also comparable across the age groups. Overall, our findings reveal age invariance in these two key aspects of procedural memory consolidation across the human lifespan.

Abstract
A crucial question in skill learning research is how instruction affects the performance or the underlying representations. Little is known about the effects of instructions on one critical aspect of skill learning, namely, picking-up statistical regularities. More specifically, the present study tests how prelearning speed or accuracy instructions affect the acquisition of non-adjacent second-order dependencies. We trained 2 groups of participants on an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task: one group focused on being fast and the other on being accurate. As expected, we detected a strong instruction effect: accuracy instruction resulted in a nearly errorless performance, and speed instruction caused short reaction times (RTs). Despite the differences in the average RTs and accuracy scores, we found a similar level of statistical learning performance in the training phase. After the training phase, we tested the 2 groups under the same instruction (focusing on both speed and accuracy), and they showed comparable performance, suggesting a similar level of underlying statistical representations. Our findings support that skill learning can result in robust representations, and they highlight that this form of knowledge may appear with almost errorless performance. Moreover, multiple sessions with different instructions enabled the separation of competence from performance.

Esettanulmányunk célja bemutatni, hogy egy szkizoaffektív zavarral élő személy narratív és dialógus diskurzusaiban a rekurzió előfordulása mind szintaktikai, mind pragmatikai szinten alátámaszthatja a nyelvi funkciók eddig feltárt hibáit. Crow elmélete szerint a nyelv és a pszichózis közös evolúciós eredetűek (Crow, 1997; 2000). Munkájában kifejti, hogy a nyelv mindkét agyi féltekéhez köthető: a domináns szekvenciális, míg a nem-domináns párhuzamos megosztott mintázatú. A szkizofréniát jellemző főbb nyelvi tünetek tekinthetőek épp a nyelv két agyféltekei koordinációjának hibájaként. A sikeres kommunikáció elengedhetetlen feltételei a jobb agyféltekéhez köthető nyelvi funkciók. A tipikus szkizofrén betegségekben szenvedők gyengébben teljesítenek az e funkciókat vizsgáló tesztekben (Mitchell & Crow, 2005). A rekurzió (beágyazásként értve) lehet a nyelvi képesség legfontosabb területspecifikus jegye (Levinson, 2014, p. 6).