3 experiments were designed to demonstrate that classifying new letter strings as grammatical (i.e., conforming to a set of rules called a synthetic grammar) or ungrammatical may proceed from fragmentary conscious knowledge of the bigrams constituting the grammatical strings displayed in the study phase, rather than from an unconscious structured representation of the grammar, as Reber (1989) contended. In Experiment 1, grammaticality judgments of subjects initially studying grammatical letter strings did not differ from judgments by subjects learning from a list of the bigrams making up these strings. In Experiment 2, judgments about nongram-matical strings composed of valid bigrams placed in invalid locations were extremely poor, although better than chance. In Experiment 3 the explicit knowledge of bigrams as assessed by a recognition procedure appeared sufficient to account for observed performance on a standard test of grammaticality. A widely held model of cognition endows human subjects with the ability to implicitly abstract the regularities or high-level rules embodied in richly structured stimulus domains. Over the last 20 years, this general model has received strong

Two experiments examined the claim for distinct implicit and explicit learning modes in the artificial grammar-learning task (Reber, 1967, 1989). Subjects initially attempted to memorize strings of letters generated by a finite-state grammar and then classified new grammatical and nongrammatical strings. Experiment 1 showed that subjects ' assessment of isolated parts of strings was sufficient to account for their classification performance but that the rules elicited in free report were not sufficient. Experiment 2 showed that performing a concurrent random number generation task under different priorities interfered with free report and classification performance equally. Furthermore, giving different groups of subjects incidental or intentional learning instructions did not affect classification or free report. There appear to be many examples in everyday life of people learning to respond appropriately according to criteria that can readily state, for example, in learning the rules of algebra. This, however, is not always so. There also appear to be cases of people learning to respond in some rnlelike way without being able to say what the rules are that govern their

Modeling Modeling is not merely a process of behavioral mimicry. Highly functional patterns of behavior, which constitute the proven skills and established customs of a culture, may be adopted in essentially the same form as they are exemplified. There is little leeway for 25 improvisation on how to drive automobiles or to perform arithmetic operations. However, in many activities, subskills must be improvised to suit varying circumstances. Modeling influences can convey rules for generative and innovative behavior as well. This higher-level learning is achieved through abstract modeling. Rule-governed behavior differs in specific content and other details but it contains the same underlying rule. For example, the modeled statements, "The dog is being petted," and "the window was opened" refer to different things but the linguistic rule-- the passive form--is the same. In abstract modeling, observers extract the rule embodied in the specific behavior exhibited by others. Once they lear...

Université libre de Bruxelles After repeated associations between two events, E1 and E2, responses to E2 can be facilitated either because participants consciously expect E2 to occur after E1 or because E1 automatically activates the response to E2, or because of both. In this article, the authors report on 4 experiments designed to pit the influence of these 2 factors against each other. The authors found that the fastest responses to a target in a reaction time paradigm occurred when automatic activation was highest and conscious expectancy lowest. These results, when considered together with previous findings indicating that, under most conditions, the relation between expectancy and reaction times is in the opposite direction, are indicative of a reversed association—an interaction pattern that Dunn and Kirsner (1988) demonstrated to be the only one that unambiguously points to the involvement of independent processes.

The concordance between performance and judgements of the causal effectiveness of an instrumental action suggests that such actions are mediated by causal knowledge. Although causal learning exhibits many associative phenomena—blocking, inhibitory or preventative learning, and super-learning—judgements of the causal status of a cue can be changed retrospectively as a result of learning episodes that do not directly involve the cue. In order to explain retrospective revaluation, a modi®ed associative theory is described in which the learning processes for retrieved cue representations are the opposite to those for presented cues, and this theory is evaluated by studies of the role of within-compound associations in retrospective revaluation and blocking. However, this modi®ed theory only applies when the within-compound association represents a contiguous rather than a causal cue relationship. Causal learning and representation is a fundamental form of cognition, if not the fundamental form. Without the capacity to learn about and represent the causal relationships between our actions and their consequences, the mind would be radically disconnected from the world. However detailed and rich our knowledge, however sophisticated and complex our inferences and planning, cognition would be impotent if our thoughts could not be

this article should be addressed to Y. Lippa, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660(e-mail: lippa@ psych.ucsb.edu)