Incidental learning techniques were employed in two experiments to investigate differences in semantic and acoustic coding with regard to retention and organization. The incidental task required subjects to judge pairs of words as being either related or unrelated on a specified dimension, acoustic or semantic. Intentional learning subjects received the same words but were instructed to remembe...

Preschoolers, elementary school children, and college students exhibited a spacing effect in the free recall of pictures when learning was intentional. When learning was incidental and a shallow processing task requiring little semantic processing was used during list presentation, young adults still exhibited a spacing effect, but children consistently failed to do so. Children, however, did m...

For skill learning processes to be effective, they must encode associations that are inherent to the current task and avoid those that are spurious or particular to training conditions so that learning can transfer to novel situations. Some everyday contexts even require grouped responding to simultaneously presented stimuli. Here we test whether learning of these grouped responses depends on o...

Several studies have failed to find evidence for incidental learning of regularities in everyday life (e.g. Morton, 1967, Jones & Martin, 1992). However, as Kelly et al (2001) noted, those laboratory tasks that successfully demonstrated incidental acquisition of stimulus regularities used a 2alternative forced choice (2-AFC) test. This type of test is considerably more sensitive than recall tas...

Multi-talker variability has been found to be very effective in the perception and production training of nonnative sound categories in the past few decades. The phonetic training paradigms were mostly explicit learning in which learners received feedback of the categories when exposed to the training stimuli. More recently, studies have started to investigate how auditory categories are learne...

Most of the words in a person‘s vocabulary are acquired during the course of natural reading, through a process called incidental word learning. Incidental word learning is mediated by a number of factors concerning word, context, and reader characteristics. The current study investigated the effects of one such factor, context length, using a combination of word learning and eye-tracking metho...

7 Temporal or spatial correspondence between multisensory signals usually aids perception, memory and learning, but we demonstrate one way in which such correspondence has an opposite, disruptive effect. Stimuli were eightitem sequences in which varying luminances and frequencies were presented concurrently and rapidly (at 8 Hz). Subjects tried to ignore the auditory component of each concurren...

How the memory systems centered on the hippocampus and dorsal striatum interact to support behavior remains controversial. We used functional MRI while people learned the locations of objects by collecting and replacing them over multiple trials within a virtual environment comprising a landmark, a circular boundary, and distant cues for orientation. The relative location of landmark and bounda...