Attention and Awareness in Sequence Learning

How does implicit learning interact with the availability of explicit information? In a recent series of experiments, Curran & Keele (1992) demonstrated that sequence learning in a choice reaction setting involves at least two different processes, that result in differing availability of the acquired knowledge to conscious inspection, and that are differentially affected by the availability of attentional resources. In this paper, I propose a new information-processing model of sequence learning and explore how well it can account for these data. The model is based on the Simple Recurrent Network (Elman, 1990; Cleeremans & McClelland, 1991; Cleeremans, 1993), which it extends by allowing additional information to modulate processing. The model implements the notion that awareness of sequence structure changes the task from one of anticipating the next event based on temporal context to one of retrieving the next event from short-term memory. This latter process is sensitive to the availability of attentional resources. When the latter are available, performance is enhanced. However, reliance on representations that depend on attentional resources also results in serious performance degradation when these representations become less reliable, as when a secondary task is performed concurrently with the sequence learning