Research has suggested that implicit learning tasks may rely on episodic processing to generate above chance performance on the standard classification tasks. The current research examines the invariant features task (McGeorge and Burton, 1990) and argues that such episodic processing is indeed important. The results of the experiment suggest that both rejection and similarity strategies are us...

Memory systems research has typically described the different types of long-term memory in the brain as either declarative versus non-declarative or implicit versus explicit. These descriptions reflect the difference between declarative, conscious, and explicit memory that is dependent on the medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system, and all other expressions of learning and memory. The other t...

This study investigated the effects of selection demands on implicit sequence learning. Participants in a search condition looked for a target among seven distractors and responded on the target identity. The responses followed a deterministic sequence, and sequence learning was compared to that found in two control conditions in which the targets were presented alone, either at a central locat...

Patients with anterograde amnesia are commonly believed to exhibit normal implicit learning. Research with the serial reaction time (SRT) task suggests that normal subjects can implicitly learn visuospatial sequences through a process that is sensitive to higher-order information that is more complex than pairwise associations between adjacent stimuli. The present research reexamined SRT learni...

Understanding what cognitive mechanisms contribute to successful language acquisition and development has remained an important but elusive goal of the psychological sciences. Current theories suggest that the ability to learn structured sequential patterns – i.e. ,”implicit” or “statistical” learning -may underlie language processing and development. In this paper, we investigate the role that...

BACKGROUND Although autistic people have shown impairments in various learning and memory tasks, recent studies have reported mixed findings concerning implicit learning in ASD. Implicit skill learning, with its unconscious and statistical properties, underlies not only motor but also cognitive and social skills, and it therefore plays an important role from infancy to old age. METHODOLOGY/PR...

Learning the structure of the environment (e.g., what usually follows what) enables animals to behave in an effective manner and prepare for future events. Unintentional learning is capable of efficiently producing such knowledge as has been demonstrated with the Artificial Grammar Learning paradigm (AGL), among others. It has been argued that selective attention is a necessary and sufficient c...

This chapter reviews research on whether individual differences in psychometric intelligence, working memory, and other less investigated variables, such as emotion and personality, affect implicit learning, with particular focus on Reber’s evolutionary theory and Kaufman’s dual-process theory for implicit learning. The review shows that while the null effects of psychometric intelligence on im...