Before continuing, do the experiment your instructor assigned ( or). If your instructor did not specify one, do . Either experiment will take about 15 minutes.
After doing that experiment, click to continue.
If you did , you now know that you actually did a learning experiment rather than a simple memory test. Your performance was probably much better than chance, showing that you learned the string-generation rule to some extent. Most people get 70-80% of the test items correct, while they would only get 50% correct if they had learned nothing of the rule. This is called “implicit learning” (Reber, 1967; Reber and Lewis, 1977).
If you did , you were told at the outset that your task was to learn the rule that generated the strings you were given. In general, those who try to actively learn this rule do worse than those who learn it passively.
It should come as no surprise that we are good at learning grammatical rules passively, simply by seeing examples. That is, after all, how we learn language. Why is it more difficult to learn the patterns explicitly? Perhaps attempting to learn the pattern inhibits the specialized mechanisms we have for learning grammar and instead relies on cognitive mechanisms that are less efficient at this task but better for more general purposes.
After completing all experiments in this section (including the Further Explorations below), see for explanation of the rule that generated these strings. This is a “generative grammar,” which may be familiar if you have taken mid-level computer science classes. As such grammars go, it is not very complex, but you can see that it would be difficult to reconstruct it from the strings you were given.