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The term « implicit learning » designates the process whereby people learn without intent and without being able to articulate clearly what they learn. A growing number of laboratory studies have investigated this form of learning in recent years. This paper focuses on the results that have potential relevance for pedagogical issues. Among the claims that have gained increasing support in the past decade, it has been observed that (1) implicit learning does not lead to abstraction of the rules underlying the studied domain, but instead proceeds through the tuning of processing mechanisms to the distributional properties of the material (2) the attention paid to the material is essential for learning to occur and (3), this form of learning is only moderately dependent on the cognitive abilities of the learner, provided that he or she is able to perform normally the initial task. These statements allow us to specify the power of implicit learning processes, but also their limits. It appears notably that implicit processes fail to detect certain kinds of structure, and are unable to provide even a preliminary draft of formal and communicable knowledge. We provide some guidelines to conceive the possible interactions between implicit learning and explicit instruction. As a case in point, it appears that allowing the possibility of errors during a training program is certainly beneficial for the formation of explicit knowledge about a domain, but could be detrimental for implicit learning.
