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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Introducing implicit learning: from the laboratory to the real life

subject

description

The dissociation between implicit and explicit cognition has a long history in psychology. As early as 1920, Clark Hull (25) investigated the learning of Chinese ideographs and identified the process of concept formation by abstraction of common elements, a process that occurs without explicit knowledge from the subjects of these regularities. Perceptual learning is another example of those processes that take place largely in the absence of awareness of the rules that govern the stimulations of the environment. Helmholtz (24) was one of the first to refer to implicit inference made by the perceptual system and to perceptual learning. Some years later, the distinction between implicit and explicit cognition contributed to mark the end of the behaviourism psychology. At this time, Tolman (74) reported an experiment that was difficult to account for in the framework of conditioning theories of Skinner (69). In this experiment, rats were put in a complex labyrinth and had to learn to get food at the exit. Not surprisingly, the rats receiving positive reinforcement learned faster than a control group of rats that never received food at the exit. The interesting new point of Tolman’s study was to define a third group of rats, for which no food was available at the exit during the first part of the experiment. According to the behaviourist school, this group was not supposed to learn anything and was actually shown to behave exactly as the control group. In the second part of the experiment, this third group started to receive food at the exit. It was expected that learning would begin with this trial, and that rats of the third group would start improving their performance in the same way as rats of the first experimental.