Implicit learning: news from the front

Incubation, insight, and creative problem solving: A unified theory and a connectionist model.

“…Similar effects have been found in artificial grammar learning tasks, dynamic control tasks (for reviews, see Cleeremans et al, 1998;Sun et al, 2005), and perceptual categorization (Waldron & Ashby, 2001).…”

The Motivational and Metacognitive Control in CLARION

“…This is because distributed representational units in the hidden layer(s) of a backpropagation network are capable of accomplishing computations but are subsymbolic and generally not individually meaningful (Rumelhart et al 1986, Sun 1994. This characteristic of distributed representation, which renders the representational form less accessible, accords well with the relative inaccessibility of implicit knowledge (Reber 1989, Seger 1994, Cleeremans et al 1998. In contrast, explicit knowledge may be captured in computational modeling by symbolic or localist representation (Clark and Karmiloff-Smith 1993), in which each unit is more easily interpretable and has a clearer conceptual meaning.…”

“…Note also that social interaction is made possible by the (at least partially) innate ability of agents to reflect on, and to modify dynamically, their own behaviors (Tomasello 1999). The metacognitive self Each of these interacting subsystems consists of two levels of representation (i.e., a dual representational structure): Generally, in each subsystem, the top level encodes explicit knowledge and the bottom level encodes im-plicit knowledge; this distinction has been argued for earlier (see also Reber 1989, Seger 1994, and Cleeremans et al 1998. Let us consider the representational forms that need to be present for encoding these two different types of knowledge.…”

Incidental learning of S-R contingencies in the masked prime task.

“…In order for one to account for this finding, it is crucial to distinguish between learning processes (the incidental acquisition of particular S-R contingencies) and the overt expression of these processes (priming effects and direct and indirect learning effects). This distinction has, of course, traditionally been made in the implicit learning literature, which is concerned with investigating learning processes that occur without the participants' awareness that they are learning something (for an overview, see, e.g., Cleeremans, Destrebecqz, & Boyer, 1998). In a typical implicit learning experiment, a serial RT task might be employed, where participants are presented with a repeated sequence of stimuli to which they have to give a corresponding repeated sequence of responses.…”