Explicit learning: people in an active process look for the structure of the information that is presented to them. Implicit learning it is the acquisition of knowledge about the underlying structure of a complex stimulus environment. by a process that takes place naturally, simply and without conscious operations.
The key problem is the existence or not of two learning systems, one explicit in which conscious mechanisms act, and another implicit in which non-conscious mechanisms act.
The problem of learning that allows it to be verbalized, because one is aware of it, and of other learning that is not verbalizable It is something that was already being considered in the sixties. At the present time it has been taken for granted that the normal phenomenon is conscious learning and what needs investigation is implicit learning.
For the study of possibility of learning implicitly, at first an experimental paradigm was used in which stimulation acts only subliminally (something that is perceived without being aware of such perception). However, this experimental paradigm has not had good results to date. Consequently, another paradigm has been used in which stimulation is consciously perceived.
What is implicit is not in the conscious knowledge of the stimulus, but of the acquisition from knowledge of stimulus relationships with others. Two related stimuli are presented at a given time in a certain number of trials, and then, at another time, they are presented only the first stimulus and how the subject acts is observed, from which it is inferred if he has learned the relationship with the other stimulus.
The problem becomes elucidating how is the accessibility to consciousness of an implicit knowledge and what is the nature of said knowledge. The methodology is fundamentally about the knowledge that has been acquired implicitly and not about the implicit acquisition of that knowledge that is what the name refers to. Tasks used by this methodology are the learning of artificial grammars, the learning of sequences and others. In the study of artificial grammars, subjects can judge the grammatical correctness of propositions without being able to verbalize the rules.
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Basic Psychology: Cognitive Learning. Observational learning
