Day 37 of 150 Pattern Difficulty 7/10
Implicit learning extracts rules without verbal access
Quick answer
Implicit learning extracts rules without verbal access. Today's question (Implicit learning) asks about a finding from Reber, A. S. in 1967. The correct option is Could not verbalise the rule that drove their judgements — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
Reber's (1967) artificial-grammar paradigm showed that participants who memorised strings generated by a Markov rule could later sort novel strings as grammatical or not — even though they:
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: C — Could not verbalise the rule that drove their judgements
After memorising letter strings generated by a finite-state grammar, participants classified novel strings as grammatical or ungrammatical with above-chance accuracy. Crucially, debriefing showed that they could not articulate the underlying rules — knowledge was implicit, expressed in performance but not in introspection. Reber argued that implicit learning is older, more robust to noise, and less affected by individual differences than explicit rule induction. The paradigm is now a workhorse for studies of consciousness and amnesic learning.
About the source
Reber, A. S. (1967). Implicit learning of artificial grammars. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6(6), 855–863.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
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