What Is It Like to Learn Implicitly?

Abstract

This chapter offers a brief overview of current debates over implicit learning (most fundamentally, learning that takes place in the absence of an intention to learn and results in acquiring knowledge that cannot be easily verbalized). When one begins to identify such cases as involving unconscious learning, there is still substantial debate over what evidence would show that such learning took place. Destrebecqz uses this state of disagreement to show how researchers have modified their approaches in response. Although some researchers still aim to demonstrate that exclusively unconscious knowledge has been acquired, researchers like Pierre Perruchet have sought to show something more tractable – that some bit of learning has resulted from both conscious and unconscious processes. Destrebecqz explores how such results shed light on the nature of the processes that seem to match the unconscious and conscious categories developed in different account of consciousness. Such implicit phenomena appear to lack quantities of particular characteristics like strength, stability in time, and distinctiveness, that when augmented, render elements with a characteristic explicitness that makes them candidates for consciousness. Learning in these mixed (conscious and unconscious processes) reveals potentially important features of implicit and explicit phenomena more generally.