Awareness and Novelty in Explicit (Deliberative) and Implicit (Evocative) Learning and Memory of Artificial Grammar

Contrary to standard cognitive theories of unconscious implicit learning, a mentalistic theory (Dulany, 1997) holds the following: Implicit learning establishes associative-activational links between conscious sub-propositional representations (evocative mental episodes), for example, those linking aspects of a letter string with its grammatical classification. With this specificity, transfer should be limited to later presentation of old letter sequences within old letter sets. Explicit learning, however, through testing consciously represented propositional hypotheses (deliberative mental episodes), should with explicit memory inferentially transfer to novel sequences within old letter sets, and to novel letter strings if there is conscious insight into novel-old letter relations.