ABSTRACT
One impetus to the investigation of implicit and automatic processes in cognitive development has been theoretical extensions from work in adult cognition. In particular, Hasher and Zacks (1979) proposed that some encoding processes, similar in characteristics to the automatic processes described by Shiffrin and Schneider (see chap. 5 of this volume), are innate and, therefore, operate efficiently from an early age. A similar claim was made by Reber (1992) in arguing that implicit learning processes predate explicit learning processes in evolution, and so the former, but not the latter, should be invariant of ontogenetic development. Another related possibility concerns age-invariant implicit memory contrasting with age-sensitive explicit memory. These proposals have fostered three somewhat independent areas of empirical developmental work, which we review later in the chapter.
