Abstract
We present here the lineaments of a new account of implicit learning, an account that does not rely on the notion of “implicit knowledge.” In this account, improved performance depends on the action of unconscious mechanisms that structure the phenomenal, conscious experience of the world. This integrative view makes groundless the search for dissociations between conscious and unconscious influences that has been at the core of the research on implicit learning and memory. We contrast this view, on the one hand, to Dienes and Berry’s (1997) proposal, which defines implicit learning by analogy with subliminal perception, and, on the other, to Neal and Hesketh’s (1997) episodic account, in which subjective experience is a starting point for inquiry, rather than the phenomenon requiring explanation.
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Preparation of this article was supported by the University of Bourgogne and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (ESA CNRS 5022). We would like to thank Henry L. Roediger III and three anonymous reviewers for their careful reviews and helpful suggestions on a previous draft of this article.
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Perruchet, P., Vinter, A. & Gallego, J. Implicit learning shapes new conscious percepts and representations. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 4, 43–48 (1997). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210772
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210772