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 lear-ning – 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 ques-tions, its numerous methodological challenges, and its link to reality. Serial behavior as a research topic has a long history in experimen-tal 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 mor