Empirical evidence suggests that levodopa medication used to treat the motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) may either improve, impair or not affect specific cognitive processes. This evidence led to the 'dopamine overdose' hypothesis that levodopa medication impairs performance on cognitive tasks if they recruit fronto-striatal circuits which are not yet dopamine-depleted in early PD and...

Prior research has reported incidental vocabulary acquisition with complete beginners in a foreign language (FL), within 8 exposures to auditory and written FL word forms presented with a picture depicting their meaning. However, important questions remain about whether acquisition occurs with fewer exposures to FL words in a multimodal situation and whether there is a repeated exposure effect....

The effect of lateralised cerebral damage on two memory tasks-free recall of words and memory of their temporal order-was investigated under intentional, incidental, and ''true incidental'' learning conditions. Ten Right Brain Damaged patients (RBD), 10 Left Brain Damaged patients (LBD), as well as 15 age-matched and 15 younger control individuals, participated in this study. It was hypothesise...

Informal and incidental learning is at the heart of adult education because of its learner-centered focus and the lessons that can be learned from life experience. But learning from experience is so broad that everything from Outward Bound activities to structured computer simulations is included in the definition. In this chapter we define informal and incidental learning and look at questions...

Across 2 experiments, the authors demonstrate that emotional states influence how receptive people are to advice. The focus of these experiments is on incidental emotions, emotions triggered by a prior experience that is irrelevant to the current situation. The authors demonstrate that people who feel incidental gratitude are more trusting and more receptive to advice than are people in a neutr...

BACKGROUND The function of basal ganglia (BG) in the pathophysiology of major depression (MD) is still unclear. Recent research found changes in BG regarding size, structure and cerebral perfusion in patients with MD. Neuroimaging shows recruitment of the striatum during feedback (FB) based incidental learning of probabilistic classification learning, while the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is ass...

Recent findings [Turcotte, Gagnon, & Poirier, 2005. The effect of old age on the learning of supra-span sequences. Psychology and Aging, 20, 251-260.] indicate that incidental learning of visuo-spatial supra-span sequences through immediate serial recall declines with old age (Hebb's paradigm). In this study, we examined whether strategies induced by awareness of the repeated sequence might exp...

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement patterns in Russian (a language that was novel to...

Very little is known about how auditory categories are learned incidentally, without instructions to search for category-diagnostic dimensions, overt category decisions, or experimenter-provided feedback. This is an important gap because learning in the natural environment does not arise from explicit feedback and there is evidence that the learning systems engaged by traditional tasks are dist...

The present study focuses on the effect of selective attention on causal learning. Three effects of the level of attention to predictive symptoms in positive and negative contingency learning tasks are reported. First, participants accurately detected a positive relationship between an incidental cue and a contingent outcome, although judgements were slightly lower than those for the attended c...