Implicit Learning of Motor and Perceptual Skills

Abstract

Humans and other animals exhibit an astonishing capacity to learn motor and perceptual skills through practice and experience. Both can occur without awareness and explicit knowledge of what has been learned. They follow similar learning trajectories and involve offline gains in performance. Work with neuropsychological patients has revealed the importance of interactions between cortex and the basal ganglia in both types. One difference that appears to exist is the capacity for transfer to similar learning situations. While skills are relatively less flexible than conscious knowledge, perceptual skills are particularly specific to the training stimuli. However, both types of skill learning may benefit from contextual interference during training, leading to skills that can transfer more readily. Many of the procedures learned during daily life have components of both motor and perceptual learning. Thus understanding how to facilitate these forms of implicit skill learning can improve training in rehabilitation and educational settings.

The power of the cognitive unconscious: The case of implicit learning

“…Many studies that have used the SRT task have shown that motor and perceptual skill learning corresponds to procedural learning that can occur without conscious awareness. However, more work is required toward the direction of disentangling the perceptual from the motor component in the SRT task and other perceptuomotor tasks or everyday settings, as well as towards assessing the contribution of implicit and explicit knowledge alone, and/or in synergy when this is the case, at the different stages of learning (For a more systematic discussion on the knowledge types acquired in SRT tasks and the various types of human behavior they can elucidate see e.g., Robertson, 2007 andSchorn &Knowlton, 2022).…”