Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A large body of evidence suggests that motor sequencing skills can be trained either implicitly or explicitly. That is,participants can learn implicitly outside of conscious awareness or they can be explicitly told and/or cued to existenceof repeating sequences. Although explicit learning often coincides with faster skill acquisition, the role of consciousawareness in skill learning is still debated. Some recent work has suggested that the benefits seen from explicit learningare not due to added conscious knowledge per se, but rather an increase in intrinsic motivation. Here we show that althoughperformance-contingent monetary incentives lead to improved performance in all subjects, this effect is larger for explicitlytrained subjects. This suggests that intrinsic motivation alone cannot explain the superior performance in explicitly trainedtasks and that explicit knowledge can confer an additional benefit in that it can allow individuals to better contextuallymodulate their behavior.