Pa. Frensch et al., IMPLICIT LEARNING OF UNIQUE AND AMBIGUOUS SERIAL TRANSITIONS IN THE PRESENCE AND ABSENCE OF A DISTRACTOR TASK, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 20(3), 1994, pp. 567-584
Three experiments investigated the effects of task load, time of secon
dary task onset, and response-stimulus time interval on direct and ind
irect measures of learning in the M. J. Nissen and P. Bullemer (1987)
task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that both unique and ambiguous serial
transitions can be learned in the absence and presence of an attention
al distractor task. Experiment 2 showed that the time of secondary tas
k onset affects the degree to which unique and ambiguous serial transi
tions are learned. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the learning of a se
quential transition is affected by the length of the time interval bet
ween the response to a stimulus and the presentation of the next stimu
lus. The findings replicate and extend results reported by A. Cohen, R
. I. Ivry, and S. W. Keele (1990) and provide important empirical cons
traints for a process model of implicit serial learning.