Implicit Learning Of Dynamic Systems

The concept of implicit learning was invented by Reber in 1967. Implicit learning has become an important and a great hot point in cognitive psychology nowadays. Tracing the developing of researches on implicit learning, we can find that, it was moving from laboratory to real life and from theory to application. To follow this trend, we chose dynamic systems—an ecological model to do some researches on implicit learning. Researchers should attach more importance to dynamic systems because of its high ecological validity and also for its sameness of real life.Artificial grammar model and sequence learning model of implicit learning were introduced in Chapter 1, the author also explicated the developing of dynamic-system-control model which has high ecological validity. Some psychologists don't think it was a good model for implicit learning because of its explicitness in learning, but the learning of real life is just the same as in dynamic systems.The researches of implicit learning in dynamic systems especially the debate about relationship between implicit learning and explicit learning were concerned in the Chapter 2. The characteristics and the mechanisms of implicit learning in dynamic systems were introduced and there are some factors which can influence the balance of explicit—implicit learning. Some researchers suggest that implicit learning and explicit learning are integrated but the construction of each other is different. They also developed the CLARION model—an integrative model with a dual representational structure. It consists of two levels: the top level encodes explicit knowledge and the bottom level encodes implicit knowledge. There are two different directions of learning: bottom-up direction and top-down direction.Altogether, the significance of this research was explained in Chapter 1, the purpose of this research is to study the factors which influence the relationship of implicit learning and explicit learning. We believe that implicit learning and explicit learning are integrated and they interact with each other.Chapter 3 is the key part and there are four experiments here. The author devised these experiments to discover the relationship between implicit learning and explicit learning by using Sugar Production Factory task—one mode of dynamic systems. Experiment 1 aimed to find the influence of complexity of tasks on implicit and explicit learning. The experiment proved that the contribution of implicit learning improved when the complexity advanced, but there are still some tasks too complexfor implicit learning. The practice level of learning was changed in Experiment 2, the results showed plateau phenomenon in implicit learning. Experiment 3 studied the effects of explicit instruction on implicit learning because instructions can determine our motivation in implicit learning. Finally, the experiment proved that implicit learning is facilitated by the implicit instructions in simple task; a more explicit instruction can promote implicit learning in more complicated task; the highest motivation can promote implicit learning in the most complicated task.The characteristics of implicit learning in dynamic systems were studied in Experiment 4. The author wondered whether implicit learning of dynamic systems would be affected if there were stories that demonstrate the control-task. In the experiment, the subjects were arranged into two groups: with or without task-story. The only difference is that, with-story-group would deal with a standard Sugar Production Factory task, while without-story-group would not be told anything that might make subjects connect the task with a certain real everyday event. The result suggested that implicit learning in Sugar Production Factory is quite the same with that in the without-story task which means that dynamic systems are suitable to do some researches on implicit iearning. Moreover, story of tasks in dynamic systems can give rise to some knowledge to people and the effect of the knowledge depends on the rule of system, the knowledge can facilitate imp...