Comparison of implicit and explicit learning abilities in human adults, children, apes and monkeys

Psychology of human learning distinguishes implicit learning, i.e. the incidental acquisition of unconscious knowledge, from explicit learning, i.e. the deliberate acquisition of conscious knowledge.

Despite that a comparative and developmental approach is indispensable to better understand their conditions of emergence, functions and underlying mechanisms, the hypothesis of a similar distinction between implicit and explicit forms of learning in other species has been largely overlooked so far, and their ontogeny in humans is not fully understood.

The present proposal offers to tackle this issue by assessing the hypothesis of a dual-process account of sequence and artificial grammar learning in a range of non-human primate species, and to trace its development from early childhood.

For this purpose, we will adopt a novel approach by using non-verbal computerized tasks equally usable in human adults, children, and non-human primates.

The proposed experiments rely on a well-established paradigm from the human literature, where a dissociation between implicit and explicit learning is evidenced by successful control over the expression of the acquired knowledge under conditions promoting explicit learning, and failure to do so under conditions promoting implicit learning.

These studies will provide key data to characterize the relationships between learning and consciousness beyond the adult human mind, through the support of a leading expert in the study of conscious and unconscious processes in humans, Prof Jérôme Sackur (Ecole Normale Supérieure, France) and in collaboration with a renowned comparative and developmental psychologist, Prof Daniel Haun (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany).

This interdisciplinary approach will be strengthened by initiating a collaborative research program aimed at exploring dual-process theories of cognition in a comparative and developmental perspective.