Familiar stimuli are typically accompanied by decreases in neural response relative to the presentation of novel items, but these studies often include explicit instructions to discriminate old and new items; this creates difficulties in partialling out the contribution of top-down intentional orientation to the items based on recognition goals.…

Recent fMRI studies have found that distinct neural systems may mediate perceptual category learning under implicit and explicit learning conditions. In these previous studies, however, different stimulus-encoding processes may have been associated with implicit versus explicit learning. The present design was aimed at decoupling the influence of…