Implicit and explicit learning of a serial reaction time task

Abstract

The performance of children in a serial reaction time task was studied. The independent variables were age (third and sixth graders), stimulus sequence (3 levels of structural complexity), stimulus type (asterisks and letters), and stimulus type sequence (letter- asterisk and asterisk-letter). Explicit knowledge was assessed using verbal reports, recognition memory, and a generation task. Children's serial reaction times decreased as a function of verbal awareness and structure, but not as a function of age. Children's implicit sequence knowledge did not appear to transfer across different perceptual stimuli associated with the same response locations. There was some indication that participants learned complex four-trial part sequences implicitly. Participants presented with the high, as compared to the moderate, structure sequence were more likely to explicitly learn segments of the sequences, particularly series and bigrams/dyads. Measures of explicit learning appear to be related to a common explicit knowledge base. These findings are interpreted as reflecting implicit and explicit learning occur in parallel and that age invariance and transfer specificity of implicit knowledge may characterize middle childhood.