Can we learn without awareness? Although this issue has been extensively explored through studies of implicit learning, there is currently no agreement about the extent to which knowledge can be acquired and projected onto performance in an unconscious way. The controversy, like that surrounding implicit memory, seems to be at least in part attributable to unquestioned acceptance of the unrealistic assumption that tasks are process-pure, that is, that a given task exclusively involves either implicit or explicit knowledge. Methods such as the Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP, Jacoby, 1991) have been developed to overcome the conceptual limitations of the process purity assumption, but have seldom been used in the context of implicit learning research. In this paper, we show how the PDP can be applied to a free generation task so as to disentangle explicit and implicit sequence learning. Our results indicate that participants who are denied preparation to the next stimulus nevertheless exhibit knowledge of the sequence through their reaction time performance despite remaining unable (1) to project this knowledge in a recognition task and (2) to refrain from expressing their knowledge when specifically instructed to do so. These findings provide strong evidence that sequence learning can be unconscious.

The relationship between implicit memory and implicit learning is explored. Dienes and Fahey (1995) showed that learning to control a dynamic system was mediated by a look-up table consisting of previously successful responses to specific situations. The experiment reported in this paper showed that facilitated performance on old situations was independent of the subjects' ability to recognize those situations as old, suggesting that memory was implicit. Further analyses of the Dienes and Fahey data replicated this independence of control performance on recognition. However, unlike the implicit memory revealed on fragment completion tasks, successful performance on the dynamic control tasks was remarkably resilient to modality shifts. The results are discussed in terms of models of implicit learning and the nature of implicit memory.

Introduction One of the putative advantages of conscious knowledge is its flexibility: It can be applied in novel ways to novel situations (e.g. Baars, 1988). Unconscious knowledge on the other hand is commonly supposed to be routinized, inflexible, and triggered by specific perceptual cues (e.g. Berry & Dienes, 1993; Schacter, 1987; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). For example, consider knowledge of directions for travelling a certain route. If the directions are held consciously, any route can be readily followed . On the other hand, once a route has been travelled many times, the directions do not have to be held consciously in mind; but in this case, the knowledge is inflexible in that only one particlar route will tend to be followed. There are cases where conscious knowledge appears not to be flexibly deployed across domains, as illustrated by the literature on analogical transfer. People often do not notice that the known solution to a problem they have just come across could be u

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In this chapter we establish what it is for something to be implicit or explicit. The approach to implicit knowledge is taken from Dienes and Perner (1999), which relates the implicit-explicit distinction to knowledge representations. What it is for a representation to represent something implicitly or explicitly is defined and those concepts are applied to knowledge. Next we will show how maximally explicit knowledge is naturally associated with consciousness. We argue that each step in a hierarchy of explicitness is related to the unity of consciousness and that fully explicit knowledge should be associated with a sense of being part of a unified consciousness. New evidence indicating the extent of people's implicit or explicit knowledge in an implicit learning paradigm will then be presented. This evidence will indicate people can be consistently correct in dealing with a context-free grammar while lacking any knowledge that they have knowledge. 1.

Using a simple change detection task involving vertical and horizontal stimuli, I. M. Thornton and D. Fernandez-Duque (2000) showed that the implicit detection of a change in the orientation of an item influences performance in a subsequent orientation judgment task. However, S. R. Mitroff, D. J. Simons, and S. L. Franconeri (2002) were not able to replicate this finding after correcting for confounds and thus attributed Thornton and Fernandez-Duque’s results to methodological artifacts. Because Mitroff et al.’s failure to replicate might in turn have stemmed from several methodological differences between their study and those of Thornton and Fernandez-Duque (2000) and Fernandez-Duque and Thornton (2003), the current authors set out to conduct a further replication in which they corrected all known methodological biases identified so far. The results suggest that implicit change detection indeed occurs: People’s conscious decisions about the orientation of an item appear to be influenced by previous undetected changes in the orientation of other items in the display. Implications of this finding in light of current theories of visual awareness are discussed.

In this chapter we establish what it is for something to be implicit. The approach to implicit knowledge is taken from Dienes and Perner (1999) and Perner and Dienes (1999), which relates the implicit-explicit distinction to knowledge representations. To be clear about exactly what our claims are we first discuss what a representation is, what it is for a representation to represent something implicitly or explicitly and apply those concepts to knowledge. Next we show how maximally explicit knowledge is naturally associated with consciousness (according to the higher order thought theory). Then we discuss the relationships between explicit knowledge and metacognition, where metacognition is considered in terms of both its monitoring and control aspects, to shed light on conscious and unconscious perception, episodic memory, and volitional control. We will then show how implicit learning should be viewed in metacognitive terms, and conclude that people' s relative lack of metaknowledge in implicit learning paradigms justifies the claim that people have acquired genuinely implicit knowledge. In Izaute, M., Chambres, P., Marescaux, P.-J. (Eds), Metacognition: Process, function, and use. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming. 1.

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.

Dominant theories of implicit learning assume that implicit learning merely involves the learning of chunks of adjacent elements in a sequence. In the experiments presented here, participants implicitly learned a nonlocal rule, thus suggesting that implicit learning can go beyond the learning of chunks. Participants were exposed to a set of musical tunes that were all generated using a diatonic inversion. In the subsequent test phase, participants either classified test tunes as obeying a rule (direct test) or rated their liking for the tunes (indirect test). Both the direct and indirect tests were sensitive to knowledge of chunks. However, only the indirect test was sensitive to knowledge of the inversion rule. Furthermore, the indirect test was overall significantly more sensitive than the direct test, thus suggesting that knowledge of the inversion rule was below an objective threshold of awareness.

Several studies have found learning of biconditional grammars only under intentional rule-search conditions (e.g., Johnstone & Shanks, 2001). Memorization of strings merely led to the learning of chunks. We used a musical grammar, a diatonic inversion, that is a type of biconditional grammar. Participants either were required to memorize a set of grammatical tunes (incidental learning), or were asked to search for the underlying rule whilst being given feedback about their performance (intentional learning). The results showed that participants in the incidental-learning condition did not learn the inversion rule and merely acquired explicit knowledge about chunks. However, participants in the intentional-learning condition learnt both the inversion rule and chunks. People have an impressive ability to learn about the structure of objects and events and apply this knowledge to new situations, such as judging whether a sentence is grammatically correct, or whether a particular piece of music fits a certain genre. This process of generalization can occur incidentally, with little conscious effort to learn