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Poster presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Orlando, FL.
Tactile and Visual Sequential Learning
Christopher M. Conway & Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
Sequential learning, characterized by sensitivity to the statistical structure of temporally-ordered elements, has been demonstrated in both visual and auditory domains. We tested whether sequential learning is possible via the touch sense. Participants were engaged in a tactile artificial grammar learning experiment, using sequences of vibration pulses delivered to the fingers. After exposure to a training set of vibration sequences, an experimental group was tested on their ability to classify novel test sequences in terms of whether or not they were constructed by the same "rules" used to generate the training sequences. The experimental group was significantly better at this classification task than a no-training control group, which performed at chance. The data suggest that the experimental group encoded aspects of the statistical/sequential regularities of the tactile sequences. In addition, we conducted an analogue of this experiment in the visual modality in order to compare performances between touch and vision.
