Figure 1
From: Explicit instructions and consolidation promote rewiring of automatic behaviors in the human mind
Methods and procedure. (a) ASRT task: participants were asked to respond to stimuli appearing on one of four locations, and press the corresponding key as fast and as accurately as they could. (b) Examples of sequences and their shared/differing transitions. Numbers indicate the locations of stimuli (1, 2, 3 or 4). The notation “R” indicates a random location out of the four possible ones. Knowing what stimulus appeared two trials before enables participants to anticipate the next stimulus as there is always a highly probable continuation (highlighted) and three less probable continuations. In Sequence A, for example, two trials after encountering a stimulus on the 2nd location, the most probable stimulus is one on the 3rd location (all the remaining possibilities being equally less likely). Sequence A and Sequence B share some of their transitional probabilities (e.g. encountering stimulus on the 4th location two trials after encountering one on the 1st location); and they differ on others (e.g. encountering stimulus on the 3rd location predicts a stimulus on the 2nd location two trials later in Sequence B, but not in Sequence A). Interference effects could be detected by contrasting the magnitude of learning of changed and unchanged sequence parts. (c) In the implicit version of the task, random and pattern trials appeared in the same color, thus they were indistinguishable to participants. In the explicit version of the task, random and pattern trials were of different colors, and participants were asked to keep track of the repeating pattern. (d) There were 85 trials in a block. There were 45 blocks in the Learning and Rewiring Phase, collapsed into bigger sections (epochs) for analysis. Probe epochs were implicit for all participants. Here we focus on experimental epochs (probe epochs led to similar results, for details see Supplementary Results 2.3–2.4). In the Follow-up Phase, we aimed to test participants’ performance on both sequences after equal amount of practice on each, without introducing much relearning. Therefore only 5 + 5 blocks of both sequences were presented on the third day. Two of these blocks were probe blocks.
