Structure transfer and consolidation in visual implicit learning
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eLife assessment
This study investigates the conditions under which abstract knowledge transfers to new learning. It presents evidence across a number of behavioral experiments that when explicit awareness of learned statistical structure is present, knowledge can transfer immediately, but that otherwise similar transfer requires sleep-dependent consolidation. The valuable results provide new constraints on theories of transfer learning and consolidation, though limitations in the statistical approach and interpretation make the current evidence incomplete.
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Abstract
Transfer learning, the re-application of previously learned higher-level regularities to novel input, is a key challenge in cognition. While previous empirical studies investigated human transfer learning in supervised or reinforcement learning for explicit knowledge, it is unknown whether such transfer occurs during naturally more common implicit and unsupervised learning and if so, how it is related to memory consolidation. We compared the transfer of newly acquired explicit and implicit abstract knowledge during unsupervised learning by extending a visual statistical learning paradigm to a transfer learning context. We found transfer during unsupervised learning but with important differences depending on the explicitness/implicitness of the acquired knowledge. Observers acquiring explicit knowledge during initial learning could transfer the learned structures immediately. In contrast, observers with the same amount but implicit knowledge showed the opposite effect, a structural interference during transfer. However, with sleep between the learning phases, implicit observers switched their behaviour and showed the same pattern of transfer as explicit observers did while still remaining implicit. This effect was specific to sleep and not found after non-sleep consolidation. Our results highlight similarities and differences between explicit and implicit learning while acquiring generalizable higher-level knowledge and relying on consolidation for restructuring internal representations.
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Author response:
Public Reviews:
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
Summary:
This paper investigates the effects of the explicit recognition of statistical structure and sleep consolidation on the transfer of learned structure to novel stimuli. The results show a striking dissociation in transfer ability between explicit and implicit learning of structure, finding that only explicit learners transfer structure immediately. Implicit learners, on the other hand, show an intriguing immediate structural interference effect (better learning of novel structure) followed by successful transfer only after a period of sleep.
Strengths:
This paper is very well written and motivated, and the data are presented clearly with a logical flow. There are several replications and control experiments and analyses that make the pattern of results very …
Author response:
Public Reviews:
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
Summary:
This paper investigates the effects of the explicit recognition of statistical structure and sleep consolidation on the transfer of learned structure to novel stimuli. The results show a striking dissociation in transfer ability between explicit and implicit learning of structure, finding that only explicit learners transfer structure immediately. Implicit learners, on the other hand, show an intriguing immediate structural interference effect (better learning of novel structure) followed by successful transfer only after a period of sleep.
Strengths:
This paper is very well written and motivated, and the data are presented clearly with a logical flow. There are several replications and control experiments and analyses that make the pattern of results very compelling. The results are novel and intriguing, providing important constraints on theories of consolidation. The discussion of relevant literature is thorough. In summary, this work makes an exciting and important contribution to the literature.
Weaknesses:
There have been several recent papers that have identified issues with alternative forced choice (AFC) tests as a method of assessing statistical learning (e.g. Isbilen et al. 2020, Cognitive Science). A key argument is that while statistical learning is typically implicit, AFC involves explicit deliberation and therefore does not match the learning process well. The use of AFC in this study thus leaves open the question of whether the AFC measure benefits the explicit learners in particular, given the congruence between knowledge and testing format, and whether, more generally, the results would have been different had the method of assessing generalization been implicit. Prior work has shown that explicit and implicit measures of statistical learning do not always produce the same results (eg. Kiai & Melloni, 2021, bioRxiv; Liu et al. 2023, Cognition).
We agree that numerous papers in the Statistical Learning literature discuss how different test measures can lead to different results and, in principle, using a different measure could have led to varying results in our study. In addition, we believe there are numerous additional factors relevant to this issue including the dichotomous vs. continuous nature of implicit vs. explicit learning and the complexity of the interactions between the (degree of) explicitness of the participants' knowledge and the applied test method that transcend a simple labeling of tests as implicit or explicit and that strongly constrains the type of variations the results of different test would produce. Therefore, running the same experiments with different learning measures in future studies could provide additional interesting data with potentially different results.
However, the most important aspect of our reply concerning the reviewer's comment is that although quantitative differences between the learning rate of explicit and implicit learners are reported in our study, they are not of central importance to our interpretations. What is central are the different qualitative patterns of performance shown by the explicit and the implicit learners, i.e., the opposite directions of learning differences for “novel” and “same” structure pairs, which are seen in comparisons within the explicit group vs. within the implicit group and in the reported interaction. Following the reviewer's concern, any advantage an explicit participant might have in responding to 2AFC trials using “novel” structure pairs should also be present in the replies of 2AFC trials using the “same” structure pairs and this effect, at best, could modulate the overall magnitude of the across groups (Expl/Impl.) effect but not the relative magnitudes within one group. Therefore, we see no parsimonious reason to believe that any additional interaction between the explicitness level of participants and the chosen test type would impede our results and their interpretation. We will make a note of this argument in the revised manuscript.
Given that the explicit/implicit classification was based on an exit survey, it is unclear when participants who are labeled "explicit" gained that explicit knowledge. This might have occurred during or after either of the sessions, which could impact the interpretation of the effects.
We agree that this is a shortcoming of the current design, and obtaining the information about participants’ learning immediately after Phase 1 would have been preferred. However, we made this choice deliberately as the disadvantage of assessing the level of learning at the end of the experiment is far less damaging than the alternative of exposing the participants to the exit survey question earlier and thereby letting them achieve explicitness or influence their mindset otherwise through contemplating the survey questions before Phase 2. Our Experiment 5 shows how realistic this danger of unwanted influence is: with a single sentence alluding to pairs in the instructions of Exp 5, we could completely change participants' quantitative performance and qualitative response pattern. Unfortunately, there is no implicit assessment of explicitness we could use in our experimental setup. We also note that given the cumulative nature of statistical learning, we expect that the effect of using an exit survey for this assessment only shifts absolute magnitudes (i.e. the fraction of people who would fall into the explicit vs. implicit groups) but not aspects of the results that would influence our conclusions.
Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Summary:
Sleep has not only been shown to support the strengthening of memory traces but also their transformation. A special form of such transformation is the abstraction of general rules from the presentation of individual exemplars. The current work used large online experiments with hundreds of participants to shed further light on this question. In the training phase, participants saw composite items (scenes) that were made up of pairs of spatially coupled (i.e., they were next to each other) abstract shapes. In the initial training, they saw scenes made up of six horizontally structured pairs, and in the second training phase, which took place after a retention phase (2 min awake, 12 h incl. sleep, 12 h only wake, 24 h incl.
sleep), they saw pairs that were horizontally or vertically coupled. After the second training phase, a two-alternatives-forced-choice (2-AFC) paradigm, where participants had to identify true pairs versus randomly assembled foils, was used to measure the performance of all pairs. Finally, participants were asked five questions to identify, if they had insight into the pair structure, and post-hoc groups were assigned based on this. Mainly the authors find that participants in the 2-minute retention experiment without explicit knowledge of the task structure were at chance level performance for the same structure in the second training phase, but had above chance performance for the vertical structure. The opposite was true for both sleep conditions. In the 12 h wake condition these participants showed no ability to discriminate the pairs from the second training phase at all.
Strengths:
All in all, the study was performed to a high standard and the sample size in the implicit condition was large enough to draw robust conclusions. The authors make several important statistical comparisons and also report an interesting resampling approach. There is also a lot of supplemental data regarding robustness.
Weaknesses:
My main concern regards the small sample size in the explicit group and the lack of experimental control.
The sample sizes of the explicit participants in our experiments are, indeed, much smaller than those of the implicit participants due to the process of how we obtain the members of the two groups. However, these sample sizes of the explicit groups are not small at all compared to typical experiments reported in Visual Statistical Learning studies, rather they tend to be average to large sizes. It is the sizes of the implicit subgroups that are unusually high due to the aforementioned data collecting process. Moreover, the explicit subgroups have significantly larger effect sizes than the implicit subgroup, bolstering the achieved power that is also confirmed by the reported Bayes Factors that support the “effect” or the “no effect” conclusions in the various tests ranging in value from substantial to very strong. Based on these statistical measures, we think the sample sizes of the explicit participants in our studies are adequate.
However, we do agree that the unbalanced nature of the sample and effect sizes can be problematic for the between-group comparisons. We aim to replace the student’s t-tests that directly compares explicit and implicit participants with Welch’s t-tests that are better suited for unequal sample sizes and variances.
As for the lack of experimental control, indeed, we could not fully randomize consolidation condition assignment. Instead, the assignment was a product of when the study was made available on the online platform Prolific. This method could, in theory, lead to an unobserved covariate, such as morningness, being unbalanced between conditions. We do not have any reasons to believe that such a condition would critically alter the effects reported in our study, but as it follows from the nature of unobserved variables, we obviously cannot state this with certainty. Therefore, we will explicitly discuss these potential pitfalls in the revised version of the manuscript.
Reviewer #3 (Public Review):
In this project, Garber and Fiser examined how the structure of incidentally learned regularities influences subsequent learning of regularities, that either have the same structure or a different one. Over a series of six online experiments, it was found that the structure (spatial arrangement) of the first set of regularities affected the learning of the second set, indicating that it has indeed been abstracted away from the specific items that have been learned. The effect was found to depend on the explicitness of the original learning: Participants who noticed regularities in the stimuli were better at learning subsequent regularities of the same structure than of a different one. On the other hand, participants whose learning was only implicit had an opposite pattern: they were better in learning regularities of a novel structure than of the same one. This opposite effect was reversed and came to match the pattern of the explicit group when an overnight sleep separated the first and second learning phases, suggesting that the abstraction and transfer in the implicit case were aided by memory consolidation.
These results are interesting and can bridge several open gaps between different areas of study in learning and memory. However, I feel that a few issues in the manuscript need addressing for the results to be completely convincing:
(1) The reported studies have a wonderful and complex design. The complexity is warranted, as it aims to address several questions at once, and the data is robust enough to support such an endeavor. However, this work would benefit from more statistical rigor. First, the authors base their results on multiple t-tests conducted on different variables in the data. Analysis of a complex design should begin with a large model incorporating all variables of interest. Only then, significant findings would warrant further follow-up investigation into simple effects (e.g., first find an interaction effect between group and novelty, and only then dive into what drives that interaction). Furthermore, regardless of the statistical strategy used, a correction for multiple comparisons is needed here. Otherwise, it is hard to be convinced that none of these effects are spurious. Last, there is considerable variation in sample size between experiments. As the authors have conducted a power analysis, it would be good to report that information per each experiment, so readers know what power to expect in each.
Answering the questions we were interested in required us to investigate two related but separate types of effects within our data: general above-chance performance in learning, and within- and across-group differences.
Above-chance performance: As typical in SL studies, we needed to assess whether learning happened at all and which types of items were learned. For this, a comparison to the chance level is crucial and, therefore, one-sample t-test is the statistical test of choice. Note that all our t-tests were subject to experiment-wise correction for multiple comparisons using the Holm-Bonferroni procedure, as reported in the Supplementary Materials.
Within- and across-group differences: To obtain our results regarding group and partype differences and their interactions, we used mixed ANOVAs and appropriate post-hoc tests as the reviewer suggested. These results are reported in the method section.
Concerning power analysis, we will add the requested information on achieved power by experiment to the revised version of the manuscript.
(2) Some methodological details in this manuscript I found murky, which makes it hard to interpret results. For example, the secondary results section of Exp1 (under Methods) states that phase 2 foils for one structure were made of items of the other structure. This is an important detail, as it may make testing in phase 2 easier, and tie learning of one structure to the other. As a result, the authors infer a "consistency effect", and only 8 test trials are said to be used in all subsequent analyses of all experiments. I found the details, interpretation, and decision in this paragraph to lack sufficient detail, justification, and visibility. I could not find either of these important design and analysis decisions reflected in the main text of the manuscript or in the design figure. I would also expect to see a report of results when using all the data as originally planned.
We thank the reviewer for pointing out these critical open questions our manuscript that need further clarification. The inferred “consistency effect” is based on patterns found in the data, which show an increase in negative correlation between test types during the test phase. As this is apparently an effect of the design of the test phase and not an effect of the training phase, which we were interested in, we decided to minimize this effect as far as possible by focusing on the early test trials. For the revised version of the manuscript, we will revamp and expand how this issue was handled and also add a short comment in the main text, mentioning the use of only a subset of test trials and pointing the interested reader to the details.
Similarly, the matched sample analysis is a great addition, but details are missing. Most importantly, it was not clear to me why the same matching method should be used for all experiments instead of choosing the best matching subgroup (regardless of how it was arrived at), and why the nearest-neighbor method with replacement was chosen, as it is not evident from the numbers in Supplementary Table 1 that it was indeed the best-performing method overall. Such omissions hinder interpreting the work.
Since our approach provided four different balanced metrics (see Supp. Tables 1-4) for each matching method, it is not completely straightforward to make a principled decision across the methods. In addition, selecting the best method for each experiment separately carries the suspicion of cherry-picking the most suitable results for our purposes. For the revised version, we will expand on our description of the matching and decision process and add additional descriptive plots showing what our data looks like under each matching method for each experiment. These plots highlight that the matching techniques produce qualitatively roughly identical results and picking one of them over the other does not alter the conclusions of the test. The plots will give the interested reader all the necessary information to assess the extent our design decisions influence our results.
(3) To me, the most surprising result in this work relates to the performance of implicit participants when phase 2 followed phase 1 almost immediately (Experiment 1 and Supplementary Experiment 1). These participants had a deficit in learning the same structure but a benefit in learning the novel one. The first part is easier to reconcile, as primacy effects have been reported in statistical learning literature, and so new learning in this second phase could be expected to be worse. However, a simultaneous benefit in learning pairs of a new structure ("structural novelty effect") is harder to explain, and I could not find a satisfactory explanation in the manuscript.
Although we might not have worded it clearly, we do not claim that our "structural novelty effect" comes from a “benefit” in learning pairs of the novel structure. Rather, we used the term “interference” and lack of this interference. In other words, we believe that one possible explanation is that there is no actual benefit for learning pairs of the novel structure but simply unhindered learning for pairs of the novel structure and simultaneous inference for learning pairs of the same structure. Stronger interference for the same compared to the novel structure items seems as a reasonable interpretation as similarity-based interference is well established in the general (not SL-specific) literature under the label of proactive interference. We will clarify these ideas in the revised manuscript.
After possible design and statistical confounds (my previous comments) are ruled out, a deeper treatment of this finding would be warranted, both empirically (e.g., do explicit participants collapse across Experiments 1 and Supplementary Experiment 1 show the same effect?) and theoretically (e.g., why would this phenomenon be unique only to implicit learning, and why would it dissipate after a long awake break?).
Across all experiments, the explicit participants showed the same pattern of results but no significant difference between pair types, probably due to insufficiency of the available sample sizes. We already included in the main text the collapsed explicit results across Experiments 1-4 and Supplementary Experiment 1 (p. 16). This analysis confirmed that, indeed, there was a significant generalization for explicit participants across the two learning phases. We could re-run the same analysis for only Experiment 1 and
Supplementary Experiment 1, but due to the small sample of N=12 in Suppl. Exp. 1, this test will be likely completely underpowered. Obtaining the sufficient sample size for this one test would require an excessive number (several hundreds) of new participants.
In terms of theoretical treatment, we already presented our interpretation of our results in the discussion section, which we can expand on in the revised manuscript.
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eLife assessment
This study investigates the conditions under which abstract knowledge transfers to new learning. It presents evidence across a number of behavioral experiments that when explicit awareness of learned statistical structure is present, knowledge can transfer immediately, but that otherwise similar transfer requires sleep-dependent consolidation. The valuable results provide new constraints on theories of transfer learning and consolidation, though limitations in the statistical approach and interpretation make the current evidence incomplete.
-
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
Summary:
This paper investigates the effects of the explicit recognition of statistical structure and sleep consolidation on the transfer of learned structure to novel stimuli. The results show a striking dissociation in transfer ability between explicit and implicit learning of structure, finding that only explicit learners transfer structure immediately. Implicit learners, on the other hand, show an intriguing immediate structural interference effect (better learning of novel structure) followed by successful transfer only after a period of sleep.
Strengths:
This paper is very well written and motivated, and the data are presented clearly with a logical flow. There are several replications and control experiments and analyses that make the pattern of results very compelling. The results are novel and …
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
Summary:
This paper investigates the effects of the explicit recognition of statistical structure and sleep consolidation on the transfer of learned structure to novel stimuli. The results show a striking dissociation in transfer ability between explicit and implicit learning of structure, finding that only explicit learners transfer structure immediately. Implicit learners, on the other hand, show an intriguing immediate structural interference effect (better learning of novel structure) followed by successful transfer only after a period of sleep.
Strengths:
This paper is very well written and motivated, and the data are presented clearly with a logical flow. There are several replications and control experiments and analyses that make the pattern of results very compelling. The results are novel and intriguing, providing important constraints on theories of consolidation. The discussion of relevant literature is thorough. In summary, this work makes an exciting and important contribution to the literature.
Weaknesses:
There have been several recent papers that have identified issues with alternative forced choice (AFC) tests as a method of assessing statistical learning (e.g. Isbilen et al. 2020, Cognitive Science). A key argument is that while statistical learning is typically implicit, AFC involves explicit deliberation and therefore does not match the learning process well. The use of AFC in this study thus leaves open the question of whether the AFC measure benefits the explicit learners in particular, given the congruence between knowledge and testing format, and whether, more generally, the results would have been different had the method of assessing generalization been implicit. Prior work has shown that explicit and implicit measures of statistical learning do not always produce the same results (eg. Kiai & Melloni, 2021, bioRxiv; Liu et al. 2023, Cognition).
Given that the explicit/implicit classification was based on an exit survey, it is unclear when participants who are labeled "explicit" gained that explicit knowledge. This might have occurred during or after either of the sessions, which could impact the interpretation of the effects.
-
Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Summary:
Sleep has not only been shown to support the strengthening of memory traces but also their transformation. A special form of such transformation is the abstraction of general rules from the presentation of individual exemplars. The current work used large online experiments with hundreds of participants to shed further light on this question. In the training phase, participants saw composite items (scenes) that were made up of pairs of spatially coupled (i.e., they were next to each other) abstract shapes. In the initial training, they saw scenes made up of six horizontally structured pairs, and in the second training phase, which took place after a retention phase (2 min awake, 12 h incl. sleep, 12 h only wake, 24 h incl. sleep), they saw pairs that were horizontally or vertically coupled. After …
Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Summary:
Sleep has not only been shown to support the strengthening of memory traces but also their transformation. A special form of such transformation is the abstraction of general rules from the presentation of individual exemplars. The current work used large online experiments with hundreds of participants to shed further light on this question. In the training phase, participants saw composite items (scenes) that were made up of pairs of spatially coupled (i.e., they were next to each other) abstract shapes. In the initial training, they saw scenes made up of six horizontally structured pairs, and in the second training phase, which took place after a retention phase (2 min awake, 12 h incl. sleep, 12 h only wake, 24 h incl. sleep), they saw pairs that were horizontally or vertically coupled. After the second training phase, a two-alternatives-forced-choice (2-AFC) paradigm, where participants had to identify true pairs versus randomly assembled foils, was used to measure the performance of all pairs. Finally, participants were asked five questions to identify, if they had insight into the pair structure, and post-hoc groups were assigned based on this. Mainly the authors find that participants in the 2-minute retention experiment without explicit knowledge of the task structure were at chance level performance for the same structure in the second training phase, but had above chance performance for the vertical structure. The opposite was true for both sleep conditions. In the 12 h wake condition these participants showed no ability to discriminate the pairs from the second training phase at all.
Strengths:
All in all, the study was performed to a high standard and the sample size in the implicit condition was large enough to draw robust conclusions. The authors make several important statistical comparisons and also report an interesting resampling approach. There is also a lot of supplemental data regarding robustness.
Weaknesses:
My main concern regards the small sample size in the explicit group and the lack of experimental control.
-
Reviewer #3 (Public Review):
In this project, Garber and Fiser examined how the structure of incidentally learned regularities influences subsequent learning of regularities, that either have the same structure or a different one. Over a series of six online experiments, it was found that the structure (spatial arrangement) of the first set of regularities affected the learning of the second set, indicating that it has indeed been abstracted away from the specific items that have been learned. The effect was found to depend on the explicitness of the original learning: Participants who noticed regularities in the stimuli were better at learning subsequent regularities of the same structure than of a different one. On the other hand, participants whose learning was only implicit had an opposite pattern: they were better in learning …
Reviewer #3 (Public Review):
In this project, Garber and Fiser examined how the structure of incidentally learned regularities influences subsequent learning of regularities, that either have the same structure or a different one. Over a series of six online experiments, it was found that the structure (spatial arrangement) of the first set of regularities affected the learning of the second set, indicating that it has indeed been abstracted away from the specific items that have been learned. The effect was found to depend on the explicitness of the original learning: Participants who noticed regularities in the stimuli were better at learning subsequent regularities of the same structure than of a different one. On the other hand, participants whose learning was only implicit had an opposite pattern: they were better in learning regularities of a novel structure than of the same one. This opposite effect was reversed and came to match the pattern of the explicit group when an overnight sleep separated the first and second learning phases, suggesting that the abstraction and transfer in the implicit case were aided by memory consolidation.
These results are interesting and can bridge several open gaps between different areas of study in learning and memory. However, I feel that a few issues in the manuscript need addressing for the results to be completely convincing:
(1) The reported studies have a wonderful and complex design. The complexity is warranted, as it aims to address several questions at once, and the data is robust enough to support such an endeavor. However, this work would benefit from more statistical rigor. First, the authors base their results on multiple t-tests conducted on different variables in the data. Analysis of a complex design should begin with a large model incorporating all variables of interest. Only then, significant findings would warrant further follow-up investigation into simple effects (e.g., first find an interaction effect between group and novelty, and only then dive into what drives that interaction). Furthermore, regardless of the statistical strategy used, a correction for multiple comparisons is needed here. Otherwise, it is hard to be convinced that none of these effects are spurious. Last, there is considerable variation in sample size between experiments. As the authors have conducted a power analysis, it would be good to report that information per each experiment, so readers know what power to expect in each.
(2) Some methodological details in this manuscript I found murky, which makes it hard to interpret results. For example, the secondary results section of Exp1 (under Methods) states that phase 2 foils for one structure were made of items of the other structure. This is an important detail, as it may make testing in phase 2 easier, and tie learning of one structure to the other. As a result, the authors infer a "consistency effect", and only 8 test trials are said to be used in all subsequent analyses of all experiments. I found the details, interpretation, and decision in this paragraph to lack sufficient detail, justification, and visibility. I could not find either of these important design and analysis decisions reflected in the main text of the manuscript or in the design figure. I would also expect to see a report of results when using all the data as originally planned. Similarly, the matched sample analysis is a great addition, but details are missing. Most importantly, it was not clear to me why the same matching method should be used for all experiments instead of choosing the best matching subgroup (regardless of how it was arrived at), and why the nearest-neighbor method with replacement was chosen, as it is not evident from the numbers in Supplementary Table 1 that it was indeed the best-performing method overall. Such omissions hinder interpreting the work.
(3) To me, the most surprising result in this work relates to the performance of implicit participants when phase 2 followed phase 1 almost immediately (Experiment 1 and Supplementary Experiment 1). These participants had a deficit in learning the same structure but a benefit in learning the novel one. The first part is easier to reconcile, as primacy effects have been reported in statistical learning literature, and so new learning in this second phase could be expected to be worse. However, a simultaneous benefit in learning pairs of a new structure ("structural novelty effect") is harder to explain, and I could not find a satisfactory explanation in the manuscript. After possible design and statistical confounds (my previous comments) are ruled out, a deeper treatment of this finding would be warranted, both empirically (e.g., do explicit participants collapse across Experiments 1 and Supplementary Experiment 1 show the same effect?) and theoretically (e.g., why would this phenomenon be unique only to implicit learning, and why would it dissipate after a long awake break?).
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