The influence of articulatory suppression on the control of implicit sequence knowledge

Vinciane Gaillard, Arnaud Destrebecqz, Axel Cleeremans

The present study investigated the consciousness-control relationship by suppressing the possibility to exert executive control on incidentally acquired knowledge. Participants first learned a sequence of locations through a serial reaction time (SRT) task. Next, to assess the extent to which the incidentally acquired knowledge was available to executive control, they were asked both to generate the learned sequence under inclusion instructions, and then to avoid the generation of the learned sequence under exclusion instructions. We manipulated the possibility for participants to recruit control processes in the generation task in three different conditions. In addition to a control condition, participants generated sequences under inclusion and exclusion concurrently with either articulatory suppression or foot tapping. In a final recognition task, participants reacted to old vs. new short sequences (triplets), and judged, for each sequence, whether it had been presented before or not. Results suggest that articulatory suppression specifically impairs exclusion performance by interfering with inner speech. Because participants were nevertheless able to successfully recognize fragments of the training sequence in the recognition task, this is indicative of a dissociation between control and recognition memory. In other words, this study suggests that executive control and consciousness might not be associated in all circumstances.