DISTINGUISHING IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT LEARNING

I agree with Dienes and Berry's (1997) and Neal and Hesketh's (1997) c all for investigations of the qualitative differences between implicit and explicit learning and note that such investigations must be guide d by a workable definition of what is implicit and by theories that pr edict what the qualitative differences might be. Following Schacter, B owers, and Booker's (1989) retrieval intentionality criterion, I propo se using an encoding intentionality criterion to distinguish implicit from explicit learning; we can reasonably infer that implicit learning has occurred when a variable known to influence explicit learning has no effect in a comparable implicit learning condition. I then suggest that implicit learning depends on noncognitive, nonhierarchical assoc iations, whereas explicit learning depends on cognitive, hierarchical associations, and briefly describe an experiment that confirms a quali tative difference between implicit and explicit learning predicted by this hypothesis.