Implicit cognition refers to cognitive processes that occur outside conscious awareness or conscious control. This includes domains such as learning, perception, or memory which may influence a person's behavior without their conscious awareness of those influences.
Overview Implicit cognition is everything one does and learns unconsciously or without any awareness that one is doing it. An example of implicit cognition could be when a person first learns to ride a bike: at first they are aware that they are learning the required skills. After having stopped for many years, when the person starts to ride the bike again they do not have to relearn the motor skills required, as their implicit knowledge of the motor skills takes over and they can just start riding the bike as if they had never stopped. In other words, they do not have to think about the actions that they are performing in order to ride the bike. It can be seen from this example that implicit cognition is involved with many of the different mental activities and everyday situations in people's daily lives. There are many processes in which implicit memory works, which include learning, our social cognition, and our problem-solving skills.
History Implicit cognition was first discovered in the year of 1649 by Descartes in his Passions of the Soul. He said in one of his writings that he saw that unpleasant childhood experiences remain imprinted in a child's brain until its death without any conscious memory of it remaining. Even though this idea was never accepted by any of his peers, in 1704 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his New Essays Concerning Human Understanding stressed the importance of unconscious perceptions which he said were the ideas that we are not consciously aware of yet still influence people's behavior. He claimed that people have residual effects of prior impressions without any remembrance of them. In 1802 French philosopher Maine de Biran in his The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking was the first person after Leibniz to systematically discuss implicit memory stating that after enough repetition, a habit can become automatic or completed without any conscious awareness. In 1870 Ewald Hering said that it was essential to consider unconscious memory, which is involved in the involuntary recall, and the development of automatic and unconscious habitual actions.
Assessment One of the most popular metrics utilizing implicit cognition is the implicit-association test. The IAT is designed to detect unconscious associations between concepts, making it a useful assessment in the field of social psychology. A controversial application of the IAT is the assessment of implicit stereotypes, such as associations between particular racial categories and stereotypes about those groups. There is significant academic and popular debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias.
Implicit learning Implicit learning starts in our early childhood, this means that people are not able to learn the proper grammar and rules to speaking a language until the age of seven, yet children can learn to talk by the age of four. One of the ways that this is possible is through implicit learning and association. Children learn their first language from what they hear when they are listening to adults and through their own talking activities. This goes to show that the way children learn language involves implicit learning.
Studies on implicit learning A study was conducted with amnesiac patients in an attempt to demonstrate that amnesiac patients that were unable to learn a list of words or pictures when their performance was tested were able to complete or put together fragmented words and incomplete pictures. This was found to be true as the patients were able to perform better when asked to complete words or pictures. A possible explanation for this could be that implicit memory should be less susceptible to damage that may happen to the brain than explicit memory. There was a case where a 54-year-old man that had bitemporal damage worse on the right side had a hard time remembering things from his own life as well as famous events, names and even; yet he was able to perform within the normal limits with a word completion task involving famous names and with judgments of famous faces. This is a prime example that implicit memory can be less vulnerable to brain damage. A famous study investigated the Identification blindsight effect with individuals who had suffered damage to one-half of the visual cortex and was blind in the opposite half of the visual field. It was discovered that when objects or pictures were shown to these blind areas, the participants said that they saw no object or picture, but a certain number were able to identify the stimulus as either a cross or circle when asked to guess at a considerably higher rate than would have been expected by chance. The reason that this happened is that the information was able to be processed through the first three stages of selection, organization, and interpretation or comprehension of the perceptual cycle but failed at only the last stage of retention and memory where the identified image is entered into their awareness. Thus stimuli can enter implicit memory even when people are unable to consciously perceive them.
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