Editorial to the special issue Implicit Serial Learning

" Purposeful behavior typically exists from (implicitly and explicitly) learned series of events. " This is a typical justification for research on serial learning. Indeed, it seems to be a sound and legitimate endeavour to try and probe the cognitive and neural foundations of serial learning – because life would be much more effortful without this ability. For example, think about parking your car, playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on the piano, or typing a letter on your computer: These activities all require serial learning. This special issue entitled Implicit Serial Learning is entirely devoted to the topic, its major empirical questions , its numerous methodological challenges, and its link to reality. Serial behavior as a research topic has a long history in experimental psychology. It was once understood as the product of simple reflex chains, in which perceptual feedback that derived from the previous movement triggers the next – and so on and on. In a now classic paper, Lashley (1951) brought (the acquisition of) serial behavior much more into the realm of cognitive psychology, proposing a more plan-based account (for a detailed description). Since then several serial learning tasks, concepts , and theories have been introduced and progressively have led to a long list of unanswered or partly answered research questions about how serial behavior is represented in the mind and brain. Notably, over the decades, a large portion of these questions have zoomed in especially on implicit learning: learning that is incidental and the product of which typically resides outside the realm of consciousness. (For more elaborate definitions and characteristics of implicit learning and corresponding discussions, please refer to Frensch & Rünger, 2003, and to Shanks, 2005.) Most of the questions on the representational basis of implicit serial learning can be roughly categorized into three major topics, and this special issue addresses these topics: 1. What is implicit serial learning, and how can we distinguish implicit learning from its explicit counterpart? The concept of implicit serial learning is as intriguing as it is problematic. Various issues are unsolved, both theoretically and methodo-logically. In answering the question on the nature of implicit learning, most approaches determine its features on the basis of often acclaimed distinctions between implicit and explicit learning, such as the former's relative automaticity and independence of attentional resources. Mong, McCabe, and Clegg (2012), for example, took up the challenge of identifying distinct processes within the process-impurity …