This paper investigated how implicit and explicit knowledge is reflected in event-related potentials in sequence learning. ERPs were recorded during a serial reaction time task. The results showed that there were greater RT benefits for standard compared with deviant stimuli later than early on, indicating sequence learning. After training, more standard triplets were generated under inclusion than exclusion tests and more standard triplets under exclusion than chance level, indicating that participants acquired both explicit and implicit knowledge. However, deviant targets elicited (...) enhanced N2 and P3 components for targets with explicit knowledge but a larger N2 effect for targets with implicit knowledge, revealing that implicit knowledge expresses itself in relatively early components and explicit knowledge in additional P3 components. The results help resolve current debate about the neural substrates supporting implicit and explicit learning. (shrink)

This paper investigates the conscious status of both the knowledge that an item is legal and the knowledge of why it is legal in sequence learning. We compared ability to control use of knowledge with stated awareness of the knowledge as measures of the conscious status of knowledge. Experiment 1 showed that when people could control use of judgment knowledge they were indeed conscious of having that knowledge according to their own statements. Yet Experiment 2 showed that people could exert (...) such control over the use of judgment knowledge when claiming they had no structural knowledge: i.e. conscious judgment knowledge could be based on unconscious structural knowledge. Further implicit learning research should be clear over whether judgment or structural knowledge is claimed to be unconscious as the two dissociate in sequence learning. (shrink)

Subjectivity is essential to consciousness. But though subjectivity is necessary for consciousness it is not sufficient. In part one I derive a distinction between conscious awareness and unconscious subjectivity from a critique of Block’s (1995) distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. In part two I contrast two historically influential models of unconscious thought: cognitive and psychoanalytic. The widely held cognitive model does not cover, as it should, the class of "for me" mental states that remain unconscious. In particular, personalist approaches (...) to emotion require a theory of unconscious subjectivity to handle the case of unconscious emotion. (shrink)