Orit Shdeour

PI: Prof. Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg
School of Psychological Sciences

The effect of implicit learning of a temporal regularity on learning new regularities

One of the central issues in education research is the balance between the gain from learning new information and the potential loss of open-mindedness and flexibility that may also accompany the same learning. In my research, I examine this question from the specific perspective of the effect of learning new regularities. I ask whether learning that the world behaves systematically helps learners adjust to new systems; or the opposite - does it leave the learners less flexible and at a disadvantage when the regularity changes. 

My research focuses on temporal expectation, a basic ability of the human brain to construct expectations regarding the timing of events based on previously experienced temporal regularities. I compared between two groups of participants using the Foreperiod paradigm, a common procedure often used to study temporal expectation. At the first stage of the experiment, one group was exposed to a condition in which the intervals between cue and target were regular (fixed), i.e.  rendering the target predictable. At the same time, the second group was exposed to a condition in which the intervals were random, rendering the target unpredictable. At the second stage of the experiment, the intervals changed to be fixed but new for both groups, and this change came unannounced. Comparing performance of the two groups in the second stage would reveal whether prior exposure to systematic timing of the world would enhance the ability to perceive a new regularity or interferes with the ability to adjust to a new regularity.

My findings show that the group which was exposed to irregular timing adjusted better to the new system and its performance slightly increased during the second stage of the experiment. At the same time, the group which was exposed to consistent timing was less flexible to adjust the new temporal regularity and its performance slowly decreased when faced with the new regularity. These findings demonstrate that when learning temporal regularities sometimes more is less – learning one rule interferes with learning a new rule.