Implicit learning is generally characterized as learning that proceeds both unintentionally and unconsciously. Here are some examples: 1 Reber (1967), who coined the term ‘implicit learning’, asked participants to study a series of letter strings such as VXVS for a few seconds each. Then he told them that these strings were all constructed according to a particular set of rules (that is, a grammar; see Figure 8.1) and that in the test phase they would see some new strings and would have to decide which ones conformed to the same rules and which ones did not. Participants could make these decisions with better-than-chance accuracy but had little ability to describe the rules. For example, participants could not recall correctly which letters began and ended the strings. Reber described his results as a ‘peculiar combination of highly efficient behavior with complex stimuli and almost complete lack of verbalizable knowledge about them ’ (p. 859). 2 In the 1950s, a number of studies asked people to generate words ad libitum and established that the probability with which they would produce, say, plural nouns was increased if each such word was reinforced by the experimenter saying ‘umhmm ’ (e.g. Greenspoon, 1955). This result occurred in subjects apparently unable to report the reinforcement contingency. 3 Svartdal (1991) presented participants with brief trains of between 4 and 17 auditory clicks. Participants immediately had to press a response button exactly the same number of times and were instructed that feedback would be presented when the number of presses matched the number of clicks. In fact, though, feedback was contingent on speed of responding: for some

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Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is one of the most commonly used paradigms for the study of implicit learning and the contrast between rules, similarity, and associative learning. Despite five decades of extensive research, however, a satisfactory theoretical consensus has not been forthcoming. Theoretical accounts of AGL are reviewed, together with relevant human experimental and neuroscience data. The author concludes that satisfactory understanding of AGL requires (a) an understanding of implicit knowledge as knowledge that is not consciously activated at the time of a cognitive operation; this could be because the corresponding representations are impoverished or they cannot be concurrently supported in working memory with other representations or operations, and (b) adopting a frequency-independent view of rule knowledge and contrasting rule knowledge with specific similarity and associative learning (co-occurrence) knowledge.

Higham and Vokey (2000, Experiments 1 & 3) demonstrated that a slight increase in the display duration of a briefly presented word prior to displaying it in the clear for a recognition response increased the bias to respond "old". In this research, 3 experiments investigated the phenomenology associated with this illusion of memory using the standard R-K procedure and a new, independent-scales methodology. Contrary to expectations based on the fluency heuristic, which predicts effects of display duration on subjective familiarity only, the results indicated that the illusion was reported as both familiarity and recollection. Furthermore, manipulations of prime duration induced reports of false recollection in all experiments. The results---in particular, the implications of illusory recollection---are discussed in terms of dual-process, fuzzy trace, two-criteria signal-detection models and attribution models of recognition memory. Illusory Recollection and Dual-Process Models of Recognition Memory Dual-process theories of recognition memory (e.g., Jacoby & Dallas, 1981; Mandler, 1979, 1980) propose that hits (accepting studied targets as "old") are based on two processes, commonly referred to as familiarity and recollection. Dual-process theory assumes that each process gives rise to a distinctive phenomenology; recollection (with or without familiarity) gives rise to the experience of reliving a past event, whereas familiarity (in the absence of recollection) provides a vague feeling of remembrance. Because participants' phenomenology has been thought to track the processes underlying hits in recognition, new procedures have been developed to assist researchers in gaining access to participants' mental experiences during memory tasks. One of these is the remember-know ...

P. A. Higham and J. R. Vokey (2000, Experiments 1 & 3) demonstrated that a slight increase in the display duration of a briefly presented word prior to displaying it in the clear for a recognition response increased the bias to respond "old". In the current research, 3 experiments investigated the phenomenology associated with this illusion of memory using the standard remember-know procedure and a new, independent-scales methodology. Contrary to expectations based on the fluency heuristic, which predicts effects of display duration on subjective familiarity only, the results indicated that the illusion was reported as both familiarity and recollection. Furthermore, manipulations of prime duration induced reports of false recollection in all experiments. The results--in particular, the implications of illusory recollection--are discussed in terms of dual-process, fuzzy trace, two-criteria signal-detection models and attribution models of recognition memory.