Evidence for "Unconscious Learning" Questioned

Can we learn without being aware of what we're learning? Many psychologists say that 'unconscious', or implicit, learning exists. But in a new paper, London-based psychologists Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks call the evidence for this into question. Vadillo et al. focus on one particular example of implicit learning, the contextual cueing paradigm. This involves a series of stimulus patterns, each consisting of a number of "L" shapes and one "T" shape in various orientations. For each pattern, participants are asked to find the "T" as quickly as possible. Some of the stimulus patterns are repeated more than once. It turns out that people perform better when the pattern is one that they've already seen. Thus, they must be learning something about each pattern.