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Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction

Sequence learning plays a key role in many daily activities such as language and skills acquisition. The present study sought to assess the nature of the Hebb repetition effect—the enhanced serial recall for a repeated sequence of items compared to random sequences—by examining the vulnerability of...

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Autores principales: Vachon, François, Marois, Alexandre, Lévesque-Dion, Michaël, Legendre, Maxime, Saint-Aubin, Jean
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Ubiquity Press 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6646945/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31517226
http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/joc.8
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author Vachon, François
Marois, Alexandre
Lévesque-Dion, Michaël
Legendre, Maxime
Saint-Aubin, Jean
author_facet Vachon, François
Marois, Alexandre
Lévesque-Dion, Michaël
Legendre, Maxime
Saint-Aubin, Jean
author_sort Vachon, François
collection PubMed
description Sequence learning plays a key role in many daily activities such as language and skills acquisition. The present study sought to assess the nature of the Hebb repetition effect—the enhanced serial recall for a repeated sequence of items compared to random sequences—by examining the vulnerability of this classical sequence-learning phenomenon to auditory distraction. Sound can cause unwanted distraction by either interfering specifically with the processes involved in the focal task (interference-by-process), or by diverting attention away from a focal task (attentional capture). Participants were asked to perform visual serial recall, in which one to-be-remembered sequence was repeated every four trials, while ignoring irrelevant sound. Whereas both changing-state (Experiment 1) and deviant sounds (Experiment 2) disrupted recall performance compared to steady-state sounds, performance for the repeated sequence increased across repetitions at the same rate regardless of the sound condition. Such findings suggest that Hebbian sequence learning is impervious to environmental interference, which provides further evidence that the Hebb repetition effect is an analogue of word-form learning.
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spelling pubmed-66469452019-09-12 Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction Vachon, François Marois, Alexandre Lévesque-Dion, Michaël Legendre, Maxime Saint-Aubin, Jean J Cogn Research Article Sequence learning plays a key role in many daily activities such as language and skills acquisition. The present study sought to assess the nature of the Hebb repetition effect—the enhanced serial recall for a repeated sequence of items compared to random sequences—by examining the vulnerability of this classical sequence-learning phenomenon to auditory distraction. Sound can cause unwanted distraction by either interfering specifically with the processes involved in the focal task (interference-by-process), or by diverting attention away from a focal task (attentional capture). Participants were asked to perform visual serial recall, in which one to-be-remembered sequence was repeated every four trials, while ignoring irrelevant sound. Whereas both changing-state (Experiment 1) and deviant sounds (Experiment 2) disrupted recall performance compared to steady-state sounds, performance for the repeated sequence increased across repetitions at the same rate regardless of the sound condition. Such findings suggest that Hebbian sequence learning is impervious to environmental interference, which provides further evidence that the Hebb repetition effect is an analogue of word-form learning. Ubiquity Press 2018-01-10 /pmc/articles/PMC6646945/ /pubmed/31517226 http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/joc.8 Text en Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Research Article
Vachon, François
Marois, Alexandre
Lévesque-Dion, Michaël
Legendre, Maxime
Saint-Aubin, Jean
Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction
title Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction
title_full Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction
title_fullStr Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction
title_full_unstemmed Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction
title_short Can ‘Hebb’ Be Distracted? Testing the Susceptibility of Sequence Learning to Auditory Distraction
title_sort can ‘hebb’ be distracted? testing the susceptibility of sequence learning to auditory distraction
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6646945/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31517226
http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/joc.8
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