The Relation Between Implicit and Explicit Learning: Evidence for Parallel Development

Much research has focused on the separability of implicit and explicit learning, but less has focused on how they might interact. A recent model suggests that in the motor-skill domain, explicit knowledge can guide movement, and the implicit system learns in parallel, based on these movements. Functional imaging studies do not support that contention, however; they indicate that learning is exclusively implicit or explicit. In the experiment reported here, participants learned a motor sequencing task either implicitly or explicitly. At transfer, most of the stimuli were random, but the sequence occasionally appeared; thus, it was not obvious that explicit knowledge could be applied to the task. Nevertheless, participants with explicit training showed sequence knowledge equivalent to those with implicit training, implying that implicit knowledge had been acquired in parallel with explicit knowledge. This result has implications for the development of automaticity and of motor-skill learning.