Associations are formed among the items in a sequence over the course of learning, but these item-to-item associations are not sufficient to reproduce the order of the sequence (Lashley, 1951). Contemporary theories of serial order tend to omit these associations entirely. The current paper investigates whether item-to-item associations play a…

In implicit sequence learning, a process-dissociation (PD) approach has been proposed to dissociate implicit and explicit learning processes. Applied to the popular generation task, participants perform two different task versions: "inclusion" instructions require generating the transitions that form the learned sequence;…

When subgoal location was appropriate to the serial pattern, subjects were likely to use a strategy resulting in enhanced rule induction and transfer with increased subgoal density. When subgoal location was not appropriate, subjects tended to use a strategy resulting in considerably reduced role induction and transfer. (Author/PN)