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Arthur S. Reber cuses is revealed by the frequency with which these two key terms were used in the decades just before and during the heyday of behaviorism. In fact, there are several intriguing patterns in Tables 1 and 2 that provide a good feel for the waxing and waning of interest in these topics over the full century. (1) During the first decade memory is actually a more popular topic than learning although the data base is small. Over the first three decades the number of articles that focused on the two topics is virtually identical, and since these patterns show up in both the broad and the narrow searches they would appear to be reflective of psychology’s broad interests during these years. (2) The first dramatic shift takes place in the 1930s. By this time behaviorism was firmly in place as the dominant approach in psychology. As good descendants of British Empiricism, the practitioners took their obligations on with a vengeance. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the number of publications that focused on learning averaged over three times the number on memory. This pattern is seen in both the narrow and the full scans although it is more dramatic in the full scan. (3) This dominance continued throughout the 1950s, 1960s and, to some extent, into the 1970s. Here the two scans show slightly different patterns. In the unrestricted scan, learning continues to be a more popular topic throughout this period although there is a detectable shift. From the 1940s through the 1960s learning is the topic of investigation 3.47 times as frequently as memory. In the following decades the ratio undergoes a monotonic decline to its current level of less than 2 to 1. In the restricted scan the abruptness of the shift is a bit more muted. Here, learning is cited 2.06 as often as memory from the 1940s through to the 1960s but then rapidly loses ground so that the two terms are now essentially on an even footing. (4) In the restricted scan, the number of articles that focused on learning actually drops after the 1970s and still has not completely recovered. Given that the number of journals and researchers increased dramatically during this era, this decline in interest in the topic is diagnostic of a dramatic intellectual shift. (5) In the last two decades of the century, there is a sense of increased attention paid to learning. It is almost certainly the case that this renewal is due to the appearance of connectionism, the first new formal theory of learning to appear in several decades (Rumelhart/McClelland 1986; McClelland/ Rumelhart 1986). (6) From the 1980s to the current decade, with the cognitivist orientation gradually but effectively taking control, memory slowly but inexorably overtakes learning as a topic of investigation. These are the decades during which the cognitive revolution matured and became as dominant over the whole of psychology as behaviorism had been during the 1930s and 1940s, if not more so. This modern version of cognitivism embraced and nurtured research on the form and, importantly, the underlying neuroanatomical representation of held knowledge with diminished interest in investigating how it was acquired. The interpretation of these patterns seems pretty straightforward. The burst of interest in learning in the ‘30s and ‘40s was driven by the field’s longstanding commitment to Lockean ideals. Memory was important, of course, but it tended to be treated as an adjunct to the more basic topic of learning. The late-century shift away from learning appears to be a classic case of “throwing out the baby with the bath water.” The abandonment of behaviorism led to the systematic neglect of the very topics that had lain close to its conceptual heart and no topic was closer to the core of behaviorism than learning. Admittedly, the failure to continue with the study of learning may have had a lot to do with the manner in which it had been studied in the decades just prior to the emergence of cognitivism. A quick perusal of such volumes as HULL’s Essentials of behavior (1951) and A behavior system (1952) or FERSTER and SKIN- NER’s (1957) Schedules of reinforcement will provide a modern psychologist with all he or she would need to understand why the study of learning was largely vacated by cognitivists. Indeed, the lingering concern with learning was driven largely by the influential theory of Robert RESCORLA (1967, 1988; RES- CORLA/WAGNER 1972). RESCORLA’s point of view, of course, is distinctly cognitive in nature and allowed those with lingering behaviorist leanings and those who preferred to work with non-human subjects to blend in with the emerging revolution. Interestingly, the research that began to appear toward the end of behaviorism’s dominance explored human functions, particularly those involved in language and thought. Psychologists began dusting off such archaic methods as asking participants what their experiences were, how clear and representative their images were, how they went about solving problems, what words they could recall, how confident they felt in their decisions. At first, these studies were carried out under a behaviorist banner. MILLER’s (1951) influential Lan- Evolution and Cognition ❘ 108 ❘ 2003, Vol. 9, No. 2
Some Perhaps Surprising Consequences of the Cognitive “Revolution” guage and communication is notable for the line in its preface remarking that “The bias is behavioristic— not fanatically behavioristic, but certainly tainted by a preference.” One of the first journals to routinely publish studies that followed in this line of research began life in the 1960s as the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. By the 1980s the power of the revolution was felt, JVLVB disappeared and was reborn phoenix-like as Memory and Language— “learning” was gone, replaced by “memory,” “verbal” was gone, replaced by “language.” And, “behavior” was merely gone—no replacement needed. To get a feeling for how this cognitivist Zeitgeist functioned, it is instructive to look in some detail at a topic of investigation that first appeared during this period, implicit learning. Implicit learning is the process whereby knowledge is acquired largely independent of awareness of both the process and the products of learning (REBER 1993). Implicit learning takes place naturally when an individual attends to and works with a complexly structured stimulus domain. It typically results in the induction of a tacit knowledge base that captures many of the structural features of the displays. As a topic of investigation, it is one of the few that emerged early in the cognitive revolution that focused squarely on knowledge acquisition and, because its history overlaps almost perfectly with the shift from behaviorism to cognitivism, it makes for a relevant case study. A short “aside”on the subject of implicit learning The first reports appeared toward the end of 1960s (REBER 1967, 1969) just when the move away from behaviorism was going public. On the face of it, this was a topic that should have been embraced by the emerging cognitive revolution. It focused on learning, invited questions about the role of consciousness and had direct implications for developmental psychology, which was undergoing is own process of cognitivization. Moreover, implicit learning maintained links with behaviorism for, by its very nature, the process takes place without the blessings of awareness. No matter, the topic lay peacefully in the journal pages, virtually unnoticed and uncited for a surprisingly long time. It took nearly three decades on the fringes before it became, quite suddenly, an official “hot topic.” Just how “hot” is revealed by the results of the PsychINFO scan in Table 4. The number of publications on the topic jumped from single to triple digits from the 1970s to the 1990s. In addition to this hundred-fold increase in published papers, Decade Implicit learning Implicit memory 1960–1969 2 0 1970–1979 2 0 1980–1989 21 55 1990–1999 244 277 2000–2009 399 914 Table 4. The number of publications per decade on the topics of implicit learning and implicit memory based on a full-scan search. The figures for 2000–2009 are projections based on the assumption that the rate of publications for the early years of this decade will continue throughout it. three books were published in rapid succession (Berry/Dienes 1993; CLEEREMANS 1993; REBER 1993), two major journals (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and Trends in Cognitive Sciences) featured it as a key topic of research, and in 1997 the “official” imprimatur was granted to the topic with the publication of the Handbook of implicit learning (Stadler/Frensch 1997). This mushrooming of interest, however, was not driven by a sudden concern with mechanisms of acquisition, but by the discovery of the phenomenon of implicit memory. As Table 4 also shows, while this flurry of research on implicit learning was going on, the topic of implicit memory was undergoing a parallel growth. At first blush, this looks like a classic “chicken and egg” problem. Did the sudden interest in implicit memory drag along implicit learning or did the emerging attention to implicit learning pull along memory researchers For anyone who has worked in this area, the answer is unambiguous: learning rode in on the coattails of memory. Researchers who were interested in the unconscious acquisition of knowledge suddenly found their work in the spotlight, not because of any breakthroughs in research or any novel insight. The discovery 5 of the existence of memorial representations that had causal roles to play on behavior but remained outside the reach of awareness struck a chord among cognitive psychologists. Within a span of ten years, implicit memory went from a nontopic to being one of the most cited key terms in all of psychology. Note the pattern of publications in Table 4. The growth in interest in the role of the unconscious in acquisition only occurred when the topic of memory was recognized as having an implicit component (see SCHACTER 1987). While implicit learning “enjoyed” two decades of existence before implicit memory was even recognized as a topic, it was quickly surpassed by it. This asymmetry in interest is even more marked if one looks at the manner in which these two topics are handled in stan- Evolution and Cognition ❘ 109 ❘ 2003, Vol. 9, No. 2
Page 1 and 2: Contents Arthur S. Reber 102 Some P
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