topics: |  psychology | learning | sub-conscious

Laments the shift in psychology from a focus on learning to a focus on
knowledge modeling, without much consideration of acquisition. 

That this book is more of a manifesto becomes clear in its opening line: . 

Excerpts

Introduction: On learning

I want to make it clear from the outset that this will be, in large
measure, a book about learning. A decade or three ago that would not
have been particularly unusual; today it is a genuine rarity. 
    Indeed, it is curious, given the pattern of psychological research over
    the course of this century that the topic of learning should be so
    poorly represented in contemporary psychology.

recent textbooks ... cover learning in the context of conditioning and
animal studies and run the standard historical gamut from Pavlov to
Rescorla on one (classical) hand and Thorndike to Skinner and Herrnstein on
the other (instrumental or operant) hand. ...  It is almost as though
learning, as an area of independent study, is viewed as a historical
topic. In the recent Oxford Companion to the Mind (Gregory, 1987), a
general compendium of practically everything in contemporary (cognitive)
psychology, the only acknowledgements of active, pure research on the topic
since the 1950s are biofeedback and operant conditioning with animals.

The impact of what Baars (1986) has called the "cognitive revolution in
psychology" on the study of the topics of learning and conditioning has
been profound.  One of the consequences of this dominance by the cognitive
sciences has been that learning and conditioning are now typically
interpreted within a cognitive framework. There has been, however, very
little influence in the other direction — that is, not much of the work on
conditioning has affected workers in the cognitive sciences. Herein lies a
problem.

... within an evolutionary framework, one can see learning and cognition as
richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating
the other. The argument will be developed around the proposition that the
basic principles of cognitive induction and abstraction on one hand and
conditioning and associative learning on the other share a common process — the
detection of covariation between events. The case for the generality of this
process has been articulated by others (notably Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, &
Thagard, 1986, and Lewicki, 1986a).

    Glaser (1990) specifically cites Newell and Simon's (1972) arguments
    that the study of performance, in an information-processing format,
    should take precedence over examinations of learning and
    development. ... the Simon and Newell research program also gives
    formalizations a high priority and invites the building of theories of
    knowledge representation rather than knowledge acquisition.

my focus will be on a particular kind of learning, specifically what was
dubbed back in 1965 as implicit learning (Reber, 1965). Implicit learning is
the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of
conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge
about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of our work has been
that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies at the
very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex
organism. As such, it is the concept of implicit learning that can, in
principle, encompass the early work on learning and conditioning and tuck it
into a more general epistemic framework along with the more contemporary
analyses of learning, induction, and discovery.

On nativism and empiricism

The same standard sources that reveal the shifting pattern of emphasis on
learning and cognition also reflect an accompanying tilt away from the
classical empiricist's point of view and toward the nativist's. Along with
the deemphasizing of learning, there has been a clear resurgence in
nativistic theorizing exemplified most notably by the work of people such as
Chomsky (1980, 1986) and Fodor (1983). There are interesting and
controversial historical patterns in these shifts.  It seems reasonably clear
that these two paradigms are like the opposite ends of a seesaw. The
flowering of empiricism typically accompanies advances in learning theory and
results in a lessening of the influence of nativist thinking. Neglect of the
processes of knowledge acquisition correlates with resurgences in nativistic
theory and increases in the attractiveness of the presumptive a priori.

... I will be presenting arguments in support of a strong environmentalism
that developed around the thesis first put forward by Dewey — that the
empiricist position is the proper default position and that nativism should
only be adopted when the evidence against empiricism becomes overwhelming.

On evolution

First, consciousness and phenomenological awareness are recent arrivals on
the phylogenetic scene. Hence, consciousness and conscious control over
action must have been "built upon," as it were, deeper and more primitive
processes and structures that functioned, independently of awareness. On
these grounds it is assumed that the processes studied under the rubric
implicit learning, operating independently of consciousness, are more
primitive and basic that those that are dependent, in some measure, on
consciousness and conscious control.

Second, one of the standard heuristics in evolutionary theory is that
phylogenetically older and more primitive structures will display telltale
classes of properties different from the more recently evolved. One of these
is that the structures with greater antiquity tend to be more robust and
resilient, less prone to disruption of function than the newer. Therefore, we
would expect to see implicit cognitive processes show greater resistance to
interference from neurological insult and clinical disorder than the explicit
processes. There is a large and rapidly growing literature on implicit
learning and memory that supports this analysis; (Chapter 3).

Third, the evolutionarily more ancient implicit functions of the cognitive
unconscious should show a tighter distribution in the population - than the
more recently emerging explicit and the conscious — we should expect to find
fewer individual differences between people when implicit processes are in
use than when explicit processes are.

Fourth, there should be a reasonably clear relationship between the point
along the phylogenetic tree where a particular property or function evolved
and the degree to which we are conscious of its form and content. That is, we
would expect to find that the more primitive a function is shown to be, the
more refractory to consciousness it will be.

How to measure the information available to the unconscious (Erdelyi, 1986)?
[Reber assumes] "the primacy of the implicit." ...  that it is actually
more surprising that any function is conscious than unconscious.

The discovery of implicit learning

Clark Hull's (1920) early work on the learning of the structure of
Chinese-like ideographs identified the process of concept formation by
abstraction of common elements, a process still regarded as important (Medin,
1989).  Hull's characterization of concept acquisition has some interesting
similarities with perceptual learning, a process that takes place largely in
the absence of awareness of the rules governing perceptual displays
(E. J. Gibson, 1969; J. J.  Gibson, 1979). Hull's work, while it implicated
variables we now regard to be of considerable importance, had little impact
on the field at the time; the Gibsons' research program became extremely
influential in the study of perception but had little impact on
learning. Hull, of course, abandoned these "cognitive" issues and shifted his
focus to the study of motivation and reinforcement — and thereby embarked on a
research program that made him one of the most influential behaviorist
theorists of the 1940s and 1950s.

The earliest studies touching directly on the acquisition of complex
information without awareness were those we carried out in the middle and
late 1960s using the artificial-grammar learning procedure and a variation on
the probabilitylearning experiment (Reber, 1967a, 1967b, 1969; Reber &
Millward, 1965, 1968). [reviewed in considerable detail in Chapter 2]

learning without awareness and incidental learning (Greenspoon, 1955;
Jenkins, 1933; Thorndike & Rock, 1934): much of this clearly cognitive
research was initiated by those with a behaviorist orientation. It was
carried out as part of the examination of the problems of motivation and
reinforcement in learning — the very issues that Hull, having left behind
matters of mind, had made the central concerns of a behaviorally oriented
experimental psychology.  Most of this research involved the use of the
repeated trial design, in which subjects were presented with complex stimuli
(usually linguistic) and were differentially reinforced for making particular
responses. The substantive issues surrounded the question whether subjects
could show behavioral evidence of having learned something about the
associations between stimuli and responses to which they had been exposed
without being aware of the S-R links.
(for overviews, see Eriksen, 1960, and Osgood, 1953).

The early implicit learning experiments that focused specifically on the
issue of unconscious acquisition of complex knowledge were run using complex,
rulegoverned stimuli generated by a synthetic, semantic-free, Markovian
grammar.  In the typical study, subjects memorized strings of letters in the
synthetic language and were later tested for their knowledge of the rules of
its grammar by being asked to make decisions concerning the well-formedness
of novel strings of letters (see Reber, 1967a, 1989a). Unlike the materials
in the earlier work on learning without awareness and incidental learning,
which consisted typically of word lists and word associations, the stimuli
here were composed of unpronounceable sequences of letters whose order was
determined by arbitrary rules.  The use of arbitrary, semantic-free stimulus
domains ensured that their underlying structures would not be known by the
subjects prior to entering the laboratory.

1 There is an intriguing paradox here. As the behaviorist influence faded so
  did the interest in these essentially cognitive issues. Yet, the recent
  concerns with the cognitive unconscious actually reflect in subtle ways
  many of the points first introduced by behaviorists, particularly the
  notion that learning occurs independent of the learner's awareness of the
  process.

This early work was also motivated by a desire to examine empirically some of
the classic philosophical questions of epistemology, including the
acquisition and representation of complex knowledge. Among those thinkers
whose interest in epistemological issues influenced these early grammar
learning studies were two social philosophers: Michael Polanyi (whose
original training, interestingly, was in medicine and physical chemistry),
who had argued effectively for the importance of tacit knowledge, knowledge
whose origins and essential epistemic contents were simply not part of one's
ordinary consciousness (Polanyi, 1958), and Friedrich von Hayek (1962), the
conservative economist who had put forward some elegant and controversial
speculations concerning the necessity for deep rules and other rich mental
representations to be held in a kind of "supraconscious" that was not
available for ordinary conscious inspection.

As the research evolved, implicit learning came to be viewed as a rather
general information acquisition process. By the middle 1970s it was being
characterized as a situation-neutral induction process whereby complex
information about any stimulus environment may be acquired largely
independently of the subjects' awareness of either the process of acquisition
or the knowledge base ultimately acquired. Most of this work was still being
carried using the artificial grammar (AG) learning procedure, although the
paradigm was now more widely used (Brooks, 1978; Gordon & Holyoak, 1983;
Howard & Ballas, 1982; Morgan & Newport, 1981; McAndrews & Moscovitch, 1985;
Reber & Allen, 1978; Reber, Kassin, Lewis, & Cantor, 1980; Reber & Lewis,
1977). In addition, a number of other studies were run that employed a
variation on the classic probability-learning (PL) procedure in which
subjects had to predict which of several events would occur when the events
followed any of a variety of probabilistic sequences (Millward & Reber, 1968,
1972; Reber & Millward, 1965, 1968, 1971). [Chapter 2]

The rediscovery of the nonrational

One of the unspoken (implicit?) elements of the period during which the early
implicit learning work was being carried out was that humans are rational and
logical and they reach conclusions and make decisions based on coherent
patterns of reflection and analysis. At least this was the general point of
view within the early decades of the nascent field of cognitive psychology
(see Baars, 1986, for a cogent history of this era). During the 1970s,
however, it became increasingly apparent that people do not typically solve
problems, make decisions, or reach conclusions using the kinds of standard,
conscious, and rational processes that they were more-or-less assumed to be
using.  People appear to be, generally speaking, arational. It is not so much
that we act in ways that do violence to rationality — although history shows
no shortage of examples of such. The important insight was that, when people
were observed making choices and solving problems of interesting complexity,
the rational and the logical elements were often missing. It was not so much
that decisions were being made that were irrational, it was rather that
decisions were being made on the basis of processes that simply failed to
take into consideration rational elements.

Moreover, importantly, people often did not seem to know what they
knew nor what information it was that they had based their problem solving or
decision making on. This theme developed from a number of interdependent
approaches to the study of human judgment, most significantly the work of
Kahnemann and Tversky, of Richard Nisbett and his co-workers, and of Ellen
Langer and her colleagues.

Kahneman and Tversky, in a now-classic series of studies, showed that issues
of rationality and logic were largely independent of decision making and were
often "replaced" by less than optimal heuristics. Often, these nonoptimal
cognitive operations were displayed in the very contexts where one would
imagine them to be most compellingly employed — for example, the statistician
making a decision that violated Bayesian principles or a physician making
inappropriate choices in triage-type settings (see the various contributions
in Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982, for an overview of this work).

An additional avenue of research emerged from social psychologists, who were
examining how people made and justified "real-world" decisions. The work of
Nisbett and his colleagues at the University of Michigan (Nisbett & Ross,
1980; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) was particularly important. They directly
addressed the notion that there were important cognitive lacunae between the
(explicit) knowledge that we thought we used to make decisions and control
choices, the (implicit) knowledge we actually used, and our differential
capacities to articulate these kinds of knowledge.

In a related series of studies, Ellen Langer and her colleagues at Harvard
showed that people frequently functioned in ways that were, to use their
term, mindless (Langer, 1978; Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978). In
situations where people appeared to be acting according to explicit and
consciously developed inferences they were, in fact, drawing on implicit
knowledge systems about which they had little or no awareness. Under such
circumstances, people provided justifications for their behavior that were
clearly at variance with what they had actually done. A substantial
literature has grown in this allied area of social cognition over the past
two decades. See Wegner and Vallacher (1977) for an overview of the earlier
work, and the various contributions in Uleman and Bargh (1989) for the more
recent advances.

...the phenomenon of implicit learning [was then tested] in an increasingly
widening range of empirical settings.

Lewicki and his colleagues at the University of Warsaw and later at
University of Tulsa, working initially from the point of view of social
psychology and personality theory, reported results in a series of
experiments that strongly paralleled those from the early synthetic language
and probability learning studies. They found implicit acquisition of often
extremely complex forms of information in experiments ranging from those on
the perception of rule-governed spatial locations of stimuli (Lewicki,
Czyzewska, & Hoffman, 1987; Lewicki, Hill, & Bizot, 1988; see also here,
Nissen & Bullemer, 1987; Stadler, 1989) to the processing of social
information and personality characteristics (Lewicki, 1986a), and the
development of self-perpetuating biases for coding information about social
situations and personality characteristics of target persons (Lewicki, Hill,
& Sasaki, 1989).

At Oxford University, Berry, Broadbent, and their colleagues discovered
similar patterns of acquisition of covert knowledge in an extended series of
experiments that explored how individuals developed the capacity to control
complex environments, such as a simulated production plant or a socially
interactive "computer person" (Berry & Broadbent, 1984, 1987, 1988; Broadbent
& Aston, 1978; Broadbent, FitzGerald, & Broadbent, 1986). Similar findings by
Mathews and his co-workers (Mathews, Buss, Chinn, & Stanley, 1988; Mathews,
Buss, Stanley, Blanchard-Fields, Cho, & Druhan, 1989; Stanley, Mathews, Buss,
& Kotler-Cope, 1989) extended and refined these conclusions.

Automaticity and procedural knowledge

By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was well understood that many
complex perceptual processes were dependent on operations that lay outside of
consciousness.  The most effective proponent of this position was Helmholtz,
as represented in his doctrine that perception was dependent on the process
of "unconscious inference" (Helmholtz, 1867). Helmholtz's arguments, along
with similar points of view espoused by Carpenter (1874), Hering (1920), and
Ebbinghaus (1885), were sufficiently strong that even such recalcitrants as
James, who had referred disparagingly to such proposals as "mind-stuff
theory," were ready to admit that automatic and unconscious encoding existed
(James, 1890, chapter 11).

After a hiatus of some decades, the relevance of these varieties of
nonconscious encoding processes became apparent with the development of
interest in the related problems of automaticity and procedural
knowledge. The interest in automaticity grew out of the work of Hasher and
Zacks and their colleagues (see Hasher & Zacks, 1984, for a review) that
showed that such fundamental operations as encoding the frequency and
location of objects and events in the environment took place automatically
and largely without awareness of the encoding process. Hasher and Zacks also
argued that this encoding process was a primitive and fundamental cognitive
process and, as such, was relatively unaffected by variables such as age,
developmental level, IQ, and affective state, which normally have
considerable impact on cognitive processing. Although there has been some
dispute over just how robust the specific process of frequency encod16
Implicit learning and tacit knowledge ing is, the general proposition that
automatic processes are different in fundamental ways from the consciously
controlled, effortful processes is generally accepted (see Kahneman &
Triesman, 1984).

The other line of highly influential research emerged from the work of John
R. Anderson and his colleagues on procedural knowledge (see Anderson, 1976,
for the early approach, and 1983, for a more developed theory). Anderson's
key distinction is that between declarative knowledge, which is knowledge
that we are aware of and can articulate, and procedural knowledge, which is
knowledge that guides action and decision making but typically lies outside
of the scope of consciousness. Anderson's view is that virtually all
interesting complex human skills are acquired in a characteristic
fashion. They begin with the labored, conscious, and overtly controlled
(declarative) processes of the novice that gradually give way to the smooth,
unconscious, and covertly controlled (procedural) processes of the
expert. This ordering of processes appears, at first, to be at variance with
that presented by the standard theory of implicit learning in which the
initial phases of acquisition are marked by a lack of consciousness. The two
approaches actually can be shown to be complementary in that the domains of
applicability of the two models are different. Implicit learning theory says
little or nothing about skill learning. [Chapter 4]

... like the early research on implicit learning, the work on automaticity and
declarative and procedural knowledge also provided empirical support for some
of the classical philosophical problems in epistemology, again strengthening
our ties with philosophy. The concept of automaticity is closely aligned with
Polanyi's (1958) notion of tacit knowledge, and the distinction between
declarative and procedural knowledge is neatly analogous with Ryle's (1949)
distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how."

This bringing of an empirical data base to bear on problems of epistemology
was an important element in the development of a truly interdisciplinary
cognitive science during the past decade. As I argued earlier, it forced
cognitive psychologists to pay attention to issues of mind that philosophers
had long regarded as critical to sensible theories of cognition. Moreover, it
encouraged philosophers to begin to monitor more closely the work in
cognitive psychology. As Bechtel (1988) has pointed out, philosophical
inquiry has traditionally been suspicious of experimentalism, preferring rich
and detailed argument about plausibility to "hard" data, which of necessity
must be collected under resource limited, controlled conditions. Yet this
blending of experimentalists and epistemologists has proved exciting and
productive and broadened cognitive psychology's domain of investigation.

Implicit memory

During the past decade, an influential, parallel line of research developed,
one concerned with the examination of implicit memory. This approach differed
from that taken to implicit learning in that questions about the acquisition
of knowledge were seldom raised; the focus was on the processes of storage
and retrieval of knowledge. Generally speaking, implicit memory is taken to
have been displayed whenever a subject evidences, by some indirect or
implicit measure of performance, that there was a memorial residue of an
earlier experience in the absence of any comparable phenomenological sense of
the previous experience.

Interest in unconscious memory has, perhaps not surprisingly, a long history
(see Schacter, 1987). http://www.cog.brown.edu/courses/cg195/pdf_files/fall06/Schacter1987.pdf
It ranges from various early philosophical treatments of memory such as
Descartes' pre-Freudian speculation (cited by Perry & Laurence, 1984) that
unpleasant early life experiences affected one's adult life, even though
there were no conscious memories of the episodes, to numerous explorations of
psychodynamically oriented scholars such as Janet, Bergson, and Freud (see
Ellenberger, 1970, and Erdelyi, 1985).

Subliminal perception

Among the first experiments ... in subliminal perception
studies the stimuli were presented using any of a number of techniques
designed to ensure that the material was not consciously encoded, including
tachistoscopic [very fast] presentation, masking, degrading, shadowing, and
parafoveal presentation. For example, in what has become a classic
experimental procedure, subjects are shown rapidly presented, masked visual
displays designed to make it unlikely that they will be able to determine
their identity. Under such conditions subjects have been shown to exhibit
the memorial residue of presented material by their choices in semantic or
preference tasks even though they are not aware of having been presented
with the material and cannot select the "old" stimuli on two-alternative,
forced-choice recognition tasks (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980; Marcel,
1983a; Seamon, Brody, & Kauff, 1983; Seamon, Marsh, & Brady, 1984).

implicit memory and priming

Many of these experiments involved the use of the repetition-priming effect
in which there is increased facilitation in the processing of stimulus
material presented previously, independent of explicit memory for that
material. This general finding has been reported in a large number of
settings, including the lexical-decision task (Scarborough, Gerard, &
Cortese, 1979), perceptual identification (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981), and
word-stem completion tasks (Graf, Mandler, & Haden, 1982; Tulving, Schacter,
& Stark, 1982). The interest in priming and implicit memory has become rather
intense in recent years because the evidence for implicit memory using these
procedures is so strong (see any number of the contributions in Lewandowsky,
Dunn, & Kirsner, 1989).

behaviours caused by implicit cognition

sergei korsakoff 1889 - in one session gives S mild shocks.   patient has no conscious
   memory, but when he comes again with the shock apparatus, S accuses him of
   trying to give a electric shock 

edouard claparede 1911: patient refuses to shake his hand, saying that people
   have been known to carry a pin. 

implicit learning

H.M.: densely amnesic patient with bilateral excision of the medial
  temporal region, including removal of the hippocampal gyrus, the
  amygdala, and two-thirds of the hippocampus.  His anterograde amnesia was
  so profound that a half hour after eating lunch he could not recall what
  he had eaten or even if he had eaten at all.

  Yet H. M. has showed nearly normal abilities in sensorimotor skills such
  as mirror drawing and tactile maze learning (Milner, Corkin, & Teuber,
  1968).

  Improved performance on such tasks clearly requires some memorial residue
  of the previous experiences. 
  However, he had no skill learning when the task requires conscious
  cognitive processes, such as hypothesis testing. On the Tower of Hanoi
  problem, if care is taken not to prompt him (Gabrieli, Keane, & Corkin,
  1987), H. M.  shows little or no improvement in performance over trials.

 Gabrieli, J. D. E., Keane, M. M., & Corkin, S. (1987). Acquisition of
    problem-solving skills in global amnesia. Society for Neurosciences
    Abstracts, 13 1455.