Distinguishable Functional Modes in the Human Processing of New Information contained in Pattern-based Structures

Sequence Learning (SL) tasks have been used to investigate implicit and explicit aspects in human performance. In the present study the SL task approach has been adapted to investigate human performance under conditions of lacking information. In this case participants have to use their own model (participant model, PM) of a possible stimulus structure. Here we introduce the term Moment of Understanding (MoU) to identify a particular step during the SL task when the PM is adjusted to produce correct responses. It was found that distributions of the MoUs’ allocations are non-random and similar under different conditions. It was possible to extract 2-component mixtures of normal distributions from these distributions. Thus, it seems that the adjustment of the PM includes at least two functional modes.