IMPLICIT LEARNING SHAPES NEW CONSCIOUS PERCEPTS AND REPRESENTATIONS

We present here the lineaments of a new account of implicit learning, an account that does not rely on the notion of ''implicit knowledge.'' In this account, improved performance depends on the action of uncons cious mechanisms that structure the phenomenal, conscious experience o f the world. This integrative view makes groundless the search for dis sociations between conscious and unconscious influences that has been at the core of the research on implicit learning and memory. We contra st this view, on the one hand, to Dienes and Berry's (1997) proposal, which defines implicit learning by analogy with subliminal perception, and, on the other, to Neal and Hesketh's (1997) episodic account, in which subjective experience is a starting point for inquiry, rather th an the phenomenon requiring explanation.