The role of reversal frequency in learning noisy second order conditional sequences

The hallmark of implicit learning is that complex knowledge can be acquired unconsciously. The second order conditionals (SOCs) of Reed and Johnson (1994) were developed to be complex, and they are popular materials for implicit learning research. Recently, it was demonstrated that in a sequence made noisy (by combining two SOCs), shared features of the SOCs may be learned explicitly (Fu, Fu, & Dienes, 2008). What are these shared features? We hypothesized that low reversal frequency may play a significant role. We have varied reversal frequency, and discovered that reversal frequency affected response times, inclusion exclusion behavior, and recognition ratings. Not only does it appear to be important to distinguish implicit and explicit knowledge, but also to distinguish what the knowledge is of.