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Implicit learning occurs without intention to learn and without awareness of what has been learned. It is clearly of great educational importance to know what can and cannot be learned in this way and what factors might make some individuals more successful implicit learners than others. At a theoretical level, the study of implicit learning can help us come to understand the nature of unconscious learning mechanisms, their relationship to other cognitive constructs such as memory and attention, and their interactions with existing knowledge in the mind of the learner. The experiments reported here address these issues in the context of learning form-meaning connections.
To clarify the basic concepts used in this article, it is useful to consider a specific model of the relevant cognitive functions. Consider the embedded processes model of working memory proposed by Cowan (1999), which has also been used by Robinson (1995) as a framework for discussing memory and attention in an applied linguistic context. The rudiments of this model are straightforward, and yet they capture insights from a number of other approaches to memory and attention. External stimuli, or internally generated associations, activate memory representations. There is no known limit on the number of representations that can be activated in memory, but they will only remain active for a brief time. Focal attention acts to boost the activation level of representations, allowing them to remain active over extended periods. In the case of external stimuli, attention also increases the detail of encoding, or the quality of the representation. Within "global workspace" models of consciousness (e.g., Dehaene & Naccache, 2001), the function of attention is to make information available to a wider range of processes than would otherwise be the case. For example, attention allows information to be manipulated strategically to accomplish a task and to control intentional behavior. However, only a limited amount of information can benefit from attentional enhancement at any one time. Which representations are selected for focal attention is partially under voluntary control, but selection also occurs involuntarily through the attentional orienting system (which, for example, automatically directs attention to unexpected stimuli). Both Cowan and Dehaene and Naccache assumed that the contents of focal attention and conscious awareness are coextensive. "I assume that, in neurally intact...