ABSTRACT
The term implicit learning was first coined back in the 1960s, and used to refer to the process whereby reasonably complex knowledge about structured stimulus displays is acquired largely independent of awareness of both the process and the products of acquisition. After an extended period of dormancy, the 1980s witnessed a renewed focus on the study of implicit learning, stimulated largely by a revival of interest in several other processes whose basic functions also operate largely independently of consciousness—specifically, implicit (or subliminal) perception and implicit memory. Indeed, implicit learning has become at least a “warm” topic in cognitive psychology as an increasing number of laboratories have undertaken systematic examination of the phenomenon. For those who had been laboring in relative (and cool) obscurity during the previous decades this interest in the topic was most welcome. It had the desired effect of stimulating an array of perspectives and approaches that differed in interesting ways from the agendas of the original researchers. Consequently, we are slowly coming to understand what implicit learning is and is not, which conditions do and do not allow for the emergence of dissociations between the implicit and the explicit, which kinds of theoretical models give reasonable accounts of the database and which are lacking in explanatory power, and how implicit and explicit cognitive processes fit into an overall characterization of cognitive function.
