How Does Explicit Knowledge Affect Implicit Learning

Substantial research (e.g., Berry & Dienes, 1993; Kolers & Roediger, 1984; Lewicki, 1986; Mathews, et al., 1989; Reber, 1993; Sun 2002; Sun, Slusarz, and Terry, 2005) has documented two dissimilar and complementary types of cognitive processes that are concerned in the acquisition of cognitive skills. Implicit knowledge is obtained relatively directly from the environment and necessitates substantially less mental effort during the learning process than explicit learning. For example, you might learn geographic information about an area just by driving to a dissimilar city even without having an intention to learn [1]. Using our example of the driver learning geography, the driver is attending to the task of driving safely even though he or she is not deliberately trying to remember the landscape. Another significant aspect of implicit learning is that it is relatively more error broadminded than explicit learning (e.g., Sallas, et al., 2006). By this we mean that implicit learning is more responsive to the variability of stimuli (e.g., among members of a category) in the real world and is more useful for detecting less salient features of the environment. Explicit learning is less tolerant of error or noise because people typically try to form simple hypotheses that explain a particular occurrence [1]. When the occurrence is fairly stable and the relations between variables fairly obvious, simple hypothesis testing can be fairly accurate but hypothesis testing is less effectual when relations are made less salient by noise. By noise, we are talking about the usual variation of occurrence in the world such as the slight differences between members of a species or how the motion of a tennis ball off a racket might be slightly different due to subtle differences from one moment to the next [1].

Children acquire their first language (L1) by engaging with their caretakers in natural meaningful communication. From this “evidence” they automatically acquire complex knowledge of the structure of their language. Yet paradoxically they cannot describe this knowledge, the discovery of which forms the object of the disciplines of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and child language acquisition. This is a difference between explicit and implicit knowledge—ask a young child how to form a plural and she says she does not know; ask her “here is a wug, here is another wug, what have you got?” and she is able to reply, “two wugs.” The acquisition of L1 grammar is implicit and is extracted from experience of usage rather than from explicit rules—simple exposure o normal linguistic input suffices and no explicit instruction is needed. Adult acquisition of second language (L2) is a different matter in that what can be acquired implicitly from communicative contexts is typically quite limited in comparison to native speaker norms, and adult attainment of L2 accuracy usually requires additional resources of explicit learning. The various roles of consciousness in second language acquisition (SLA) include: the learner noticing negative evidence; their attending to language form, their perception focused by social scaffolding or explicit instruction; their voluntary use of pedagogical grammatical descriptions and analogical reasoning; their reflective induction of metalinguistic insights about language; and their consciously guided practice which results, eventually, in unconscious, automatized skill. From various divisions of cognitive neuroscience, we know that implicit and explicit learning are distinct processes, that humans have separate implicit and explicit memory systems, that there are different types of

Sometimes such interactions increase performance as compared to either system operating alone. In other situations activating the explicit system may impair implicit learning or have no effect. It is important to understand these interactions to inform educators on best learning practices. For example, telling participants to reflect or figure out the rules while performing a task increases explicit learning processes.

Implicit learning has been actively investigated, the complex and multifaceted interactions between the implicit and the explicit and the importance of this interaction have not been universally recognized; to a large extent, such interactions have been downplayed or ignored, with only a few noteworthy exceptions.

1. Ron Sun, Robert C. Mathews and Sean M. Lane, “Implicit and Explicit Processes in the Development of Cognitive Skills: A Theoretical Interpretation with Some Practical Implications for Science Education” 2. http://www.personal.umich.edu/~ncellis/Langu ageLearningLab/Publications_files/Implicit%20and%20explicit%20knowledge%20about%20language.pdf 3. Berry, C. C., & Dienes, Z. (1993). Implicit learning: Theoretical and empirical issues. East Sussex, UK: Erlbaum. 4. Kolers, P. A., & Roediger, H. L. (1984). Procedures of mind. Journal of Verbal Learning and VerbalBehavior,23, 425-449 5. Lewicki, P. (1986). Processing information about covariations that cannot be articulated. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12, 135-146. 6. Stanley, W. B., Mathews, R. C., Buss, R. R., & Kotler-Cope, S. (1989). Insight without awareness: On the interaction of verbalization, instruction, and practice in a simulated process control task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 41, 553-577. 7. Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge: An essay on the cognitive 8. Sun, R. (2002). Duality of the mind. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. 9. Sun, R. Slusarz, P. & Terry, C. (2005). The interaction of the explicit and the implicit in skill learning: A dual-process approach. Psychological Review, 112(1), 159-192. 10. Sallas, B., Mathews, R. C., Lane, S. M., & Sun, R. (2006). Integrating memory-based and model-based knowledge of an artificial grammar using animation. Manuscript in preparation