ABSTRACT
Much of the way in which humans respond and adapt to the environment occurs implicitly, without conscious awareness and often without intention (e.g., Frensch, 1998; Reber, 1967). Conscious processes are constrained by limits to the information-processing capacity of the brain (e.g., Baars, 1998; Kahneman, 1973), so it is not surprising that implicit (unconscious) processes underlie our interaction with the environment. Nor is it surprising that evolution has selected advantages of implicit (unconscious) learning, given that learning is a biological imperative, which provided our ancestors with a significant survival advantage (Claxton, 1997).
To operationalize implicit learning is challenging and much debated (see Frensch & Rünger, 2003). It is generally agreed that implicit learning is the antithesis of explicit learning, during which purposeful hypothesis testing exposes rules and knowledge thought to govern effective behavior. In the 1960s, Arthur Reber used artificial grammar learning to examine how people learned compound rules governing complex tasks. Participants were not informed of the rules, but when later asked to determine whether unfamiliar exemplars followed the same rules they were surprisingly accurate, despite negligible conscious knowledge of the rules (see Pothos, 2007). Reber (1989) considered implicit learning to be the accrual of knowledge that “in some raw fashion, is always ahead of the capability of its processor to explicate” (p. 229).
