What is the difference between players of the category of Vishwanathan Anand, Gary Kasparov and a novice chess player? Or, what is it that makes the "experts" experts? Is it that these people are born with some inborn talent which is a result of years of family experiences (i.e, is hereditary) or is it that they have "acquired" it?
Had it been the former case, we would expect that an expert's offspring to be expert (after all expertise is hereditary) or that expert in one field is an expert in some similar field. But that is not so, Nawab Pataudi's son is not a cricket player and even though chess is a logical game, a chess expert might not be expert in other logical things like puzzles. In fact, when the experts are asked to articulate how they are playing and selecting the moves, many times even they are not sure how to explain their thinking process.
This makes us think - are decisions really taken rationally? The answer as discussed by Reber is that it might not necessarily be the case. The difference lies in the quality with which we organize and represent knowledge. We might take decisions explicitly in the initial phase of learning, but as we get better and approach expertise, we tend extract patterns out of our experiences and into implicit patterns, mostly unknowingly.
So is there any role of coaching or teaching if everything is learned in the above described manner? What we think is, Yes, coaching is necessary, it provides a path to think and restricts the space of tacit learning (there is always a scope of wandering away in situations where there is no instruction, while in the other case the person knows what basic things he has to focus on learning) which helps in a decrease in the practice time required to get the grasp. When there is someone to prompt us, we tend to develop the basic skills faster. It helps to organize the implicit memory. But after that, it is mostly the implicit memory and the learning that helps.
This is similar to the manifold learning model. As we get better in some task, the dimension of our sample space to take the decisions decreases. Consider the situation when a person learns to drive a car. In the initial period, one pays attention to details like how to turn the key, changes gears explicitly by looking at the knob and pays very less attention to road, but as he/she progresses, more attention is paid to the road and the traffic. Even tasks like switching gears in heavy traffic or applying a sudden break don't need to be done after thinking explicitly on them. They are just done and even in some cases, the person gets the knowledge that he pressed the break after it has been pressed.
So what does an "expert" do while, lets say, playing cricket. If he can guess the speed, line and length to a fairly good extent, what goes on in his mind till the ball comes to him. We think that the person explicitly thinks of how the action he is going to take would be the right one, and in that process, adds that experience to his implicit memory. Thus implicit learning also helps after gaining expertise, to reduce the time factor and takes the decision making to a higher level.
Is there a clear distinction between explicit and implicit decision making? Our notion was that, implicit decision making reduces the time of decision making and reduces the response time. When suddenly we come across an event which gets difficult in explanation, we tend to shift to think about it explicitly. Consider the images shown in class in which it was asked to identify whether one image is rotated form of other. The answer to the first one was simple and mostly done implicitly, but the second one was not easily visible transformation so we explicitly began to think about it.
One of the other things that popped up in our discussion was that sometime we have to unlearn things. In fact it is said that 'The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.' This is because if we are not learning things in the "right" way, we might have to delete the patterns which have been formed in order to get a better understanding of things. And that unlearning the things learnt implicitly or in our implicit memory is much more difficult as compared to those learnt explicitly. Consider the spelling of "vacuum" and "protein" (generally spelled "vaccum" and "protien"). When it is told to a child to correct the spellings, it is ways for him to learn, but when as an adult, we are asked to do the same thing, we find it more difficult. Initially we feel that the spelling "vacuum" is wrong. But as it gets into our implicit memory after we unlearn "vaccum", the spelling "vacuum" appears more correct.