INCIDENTALLY, THINGS IN GENERAL ARE PARTICULARLY DETERMINED - AN EPISODIC-PROCESSING ACCOUNT OF IMPLICIT LEARNING

People can become sensitive to the rules of a grammar without awareness. A. S. Reber (1989) and others have argued that this implicit learning results from automatic abstraction of general structure. Instead, we argue that people perform only those operations required to satisfy known demands. In various tasks, Ss learned the structures of individual items, coded experiences of processing items in specific ways, or abstracted elements of the general structure: There was no evidence that Ss abstracted structure when it was not required to perform the immediate task. Each type of knowledge was acquired without awareness that the domain had a general structure, but each made Ss sensitive to certain aspects of that structure, enabling them to identify grammatical items in an unanticipated test. The conclusion is that implicit sensitivity to general structure is accidental, a by-product of coding whatever Ss experience in processing stimuli for another purpose.