The Emergence of Explicit Knowledge from Implicit Learning The Emergence of Explicit Knowledge from Implicit Learning

Abstract Substantial evidence has highlighted the ability of observers to incidentally extract statistical contingencies present in visual environments. This study examined whether this knowledge extracted regarding statistical contingencies are unconscious initially, even when it becomes fully accessible to conscious awareness after extensive training. Using a "typical" contextual cueing procedure adapted to real-world scenes, we first observed that, after extensive training in searching for a target within repeated scenes, knowledge about regularities was associated with conscious awareness (Experiment 1). However, both subjective and objective measures of consciousness revealed that in the early phase of training, learning of regular structures first takes place at an unconscious Over the past two decades, a substantial amount of evidence has highlighted the remarkable ability of observers to extract and use statistical contingencies present in structured stimulus environments (e.g. In the classic task of the contextual cueing paradigm, participants are instructed to search for a T (target) among Ls (distractors) and report whether the top of the T points left or right. Half of the configurations are systematically repeated across many blocks of trials while the other half are novel. A progressive benefit on search time, named contextual cueing, is typically observed in the repeated contexts, which are predictive of the target's location compared to the novel contexts. Yet, at the end of the search task, participants rarely report having noticed that some displays were repeated across the task, and their performance in a final direct memory task (i.e., recognition and/or target generation) is typically at or near chance levels. This finding is taken to suggest that the contextual cueing effect results from implicit learnin