Multimodal Implicit Learning in a Simulated Real-World Environment

Thesis (Ph.D.), Department of Psychology, Washington State UniversityA debate exists concerning the source of performance decrements observed in the literature during implicit learning of multimodal compared to unimodal sequences. Some authors argue that these decrements are due to erroneous associations between the multimodal stimuli, termed organization accounts, while others argue that attentional resource limitations are the origin of the impairment, termed attentional resource accounts. The present study investigated the degree to which erroneous associations between the multimodal stimuli influence multimodal sequence learning, by varying the organization of presentation of the multimodal sequences. Results showed that the degree to which the organization of multimodal sequences influences performance is dependent on algorithm difficulty and stimulus modality. Consequences of these results for attentional and organizational accounts of dual-task decrements in implicit learning are discussed.Department of Psychology - Experimental, Washington State Universit