IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE AND EXPLICITATION

•	Concerns itself with dissociations between behaviour and verbal responses
Verbal Responses: tap explicit understanding because the child explicitly expresses a belief
Behavioural Responses: might tap implicit or explicit understanding

1.	Eye Gaze 1: child looks with surprise when an object is placed at B, but revealed from A (recognition memory)
2.	Eye Gaze 2: child asked “Where is the toy?”, and she looks to B (recall memory)
3.	Reaching: child is asked “Where is the toy?”, and she reaches to B (recall memory + deliberately executed response)

Dissociations (Correct Eye Gaze) are Common, Particularly in Infancy
•	Object permanence & A not B
Karmiloff-Smith (1992):
•	Knowledge begins as implicit and as “procedures” (e.g., piano playing, drawing a person)
•	It subsequently becomes “re-described” into explicit (E1) format (non-conscious), then again into E2 and E3 format (increasingly explicit and available for reflection)
•	Level I: no links within the knowledge domain or with other knowledge domains are present
•	Level E1: are “reduced descriptions” of I level procedures (have lost some detail), but are not available to consciousness or verbal report
•	Level E2: representations are available to consciousness but not verbal report (e.g., spatial knowledge)
•	Level E3: representations are available to consciousness and verbal report
Example:
Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder (1975): block balancing on a beam
•	Children experiment with every new block (no rule), but balance most  implicit knowledge
•	Learn rule (blocks balance on geometric centre), initially place blocks on centre & apply rule inflexibly (if use blocks with weight inserted at one end, don’t move off centre)  explicit knowledge
•	Learn to apply rule flexibly so re-adjust if block doesn’t initially balance  flexible explicit knowledge

Dissociations in Conservation Tasks
Church & Goldin-Meadow (1986, Cognition) Study 1:
•	asked children to assess whether “same” or “different” amount of fluid in conversation tasks, and then to explain their conclusion
•	Tested 5- to 8-year-olds on 6 conservation tasks
•	Using same-different judgements, found 5 children were consistently non-conservers (age 5;2), 9 were partial conservers (6;6), and 14 were conservers (7;2)
•	Obtained gesture-speech mismatches in explanations
•	Example 1: speech described action (“You poured water from the glass into the dish”) whereas gesture was about height of glass and shortness of dish)
•	Example 2: speech describes a dimension (“The dish is wide”) whereas gesture conveys both width and compensating height
•	As if the information not represented in speech is represented implicitly
•	82% of explanations were accompanied by gesture and half of these were gesture-speech mismatches
•	concordant children: less than 50% of explanations included gesture-speech mismatches
•	discordant children: more than 50% of explanations included gesture-speech mismatches  taken as a measure of inconsistent thinking

	Concordant	Discordant	
Non-Conservers	2   (40%)	3   (60%)	
Partial Conservers	4   (44%)	5   (56%)	
Conservers	9   (64%)	5   (36%)	

Study 2:
•	tested partial conservers who were either concordant or discordant
•	either trained them on conservation, or didn’t train them

	Instruction	No Instruction	
	Concordant	Discordant	Concordant	Discordant	
No
Improvement	
50%	
14%	
83%	
60%	

Improvement	
50%	
86%	
16%	
40%	

•	so gesture-speech mismatches seem to pick up transitional knowledge  but is it implicit as Church & Goldin-Meadow and Goldin-Meadow et al. (1993) suggest?

Evidence Against Gesture-Speech Mismatches as Implicit
Goldin-Meadow et al. (1993, JEP: Human Perception and Performance)
•	5 + 3 + 4 = _ + 4
•	when explaining how solved, gestures might be inconsistent with words   words: “I added 5 + 3 + 4”; gestures: point to all numbers on left and right of “=”
•	discordant children’s performance on secondary task (word recall) was impaired relative to concordant children   would only do so if working memory capacity was over-run and this suggests the discordant strategies were explicitly represented
•	conclusion contrasts directly with Goldin-Meadow et al.
•	gestures may not be implicit

Are Nonverbal Responses Ever Implicit?
Clements & Perner (1994): Eye gaze as a measure of understanding
False Belief:
1.	Sam mouse puts cheese in box “A”
2.	Sam goes to bed
3.	Katy mouse moves cheese to box “B”
4.	Sam wakes up, goes to get cheese
Implicit Prompt (Narrator): “I wonder where he’ll look?”
Explicit Question (Experimenter): “Which box will he open first?”
True Belief: At step (3), Sam sees Katy move cheese

Number Correct Over False and True Belief
	Age	

	2-5 to 2-10
(n=11)	2-11 to 3-2
(n=11)	3-3 to 3-7
(n=11)	3-8 to 4-6
(n=11)	
Implicit	1	8	8	11	
Explicit	1	2	5	7	

But is eye gaze implicit? Could it be explicit, low confidence knowledge  aware Sam might go to left-hand container but not confident?

Ruffman et al. (2001)
•	Dienes et al. (1995)  people are no more confident in correct decisions on artificial grammar learning tasks than in incorrect decisions  no metacognitive insight into the knowledge that they clearly possess
•	Metacognitive insight is last step to full explicitness in Dienes & Perner (1999) model  attitude explicitness
Tasks:
Belief Tasks
	True belief
	False belief
Probability Control
	10-0: 10 green, 0 red
	9-1: 9 green, 1 red
•	0-10: 10 red, 0 green

Betting
•	Measures explicit knowledge   child asked to make explicit commitment to where character will search

Response Patterns for Ss who show correct eye gaze on f.b. task but incorrect explicit:
	Explicit knowledge but low confidence: bet on both left- and right-hand locations
	Implicit knowledge: bet with great certainty on right-hand location (where say character will go)

Participants:
	76 children, 3 to 5 years of age

Scoring:
	Eye Gaze Pass: look more to left-hand location in f.b. task, and more to right-hand location in t.b. task
	Explicit Pass: indicate (point or say) character would go to left-hand location in f.b. task, and right-hand location in t.b.

Results: Eye Gaze vs. Explicit
	eye gaze much easier than verbal performance
	Particularly interested in children who passed explicit question of t.b. task, passed eye gaze measure over t.b. and f.b. tasks, but who then either failed or passed explicit measure of f.b. task  would confidence increase or decrease as explicit f.b. understanding developed?
	18 younger failers
	17 older failers
	13 younger passers
	13 older passers

Betting
	False belief:
	children who passed f.b. task (said character would return to left-hand location)  number of counters bet on left-hand location
	children who failed f.b. task (said character would return to right-hand location)  number of counters bet on right-hand location

	True belief:
•	number of counters bet on right-hand location

	10 red - 0 green:
•	number of counters bet on red location

	0 red - 10 green:
•	number of counters bet on green location

	9 red - 1 green:
•	number of counters bet on red location

Percentage of Children Betting All Counters on the Dominant Location

But is Eye Gaze Based on the Same Insight as Verbal Answers?
•	eye gaze based on ignorance, and verbal answers on belief?
•	O’Neill (1996):
•	Parent witnesses toy placed on high shelf or doesn’t
•	2-year-olds name toy and gesture to its location when parent hasn’t seen  sensitive to parents’ lack of attention/knowledge
•	eye gaze and gesturing/naming are indirect measures  might both index implicit knowledge
•	in Clements & Perner (1994) & Ruffman et al. (2001) there are two locations   if child thinks character doesn’t know, then by default, the child will look to the location where the object isn’t
•	so need 3 locations

Garnham & Ruffman (2001):
•	2 locations
•	Knowledge: child should look to empty location
•	Belief: child should look to empty location
•	3 locations: starts at 1, then moved to 3
•	Knowledge: child should look to either empty location equally (1 or 2)
•	Belief: child should look to location where character placed object (1)

3

2

1

Mean Looking Times to Each Location for False Belief and True Belief Passers and Failers Separately

							     Direction of Gaze
					Left				Middle		Right
					(Initial							(Later
					Location)						Location)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Condition				Mean				Mean			Mean	
					(ms)				(ms)			(ms)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
False Belief Verbal
Fail (n=26)			282.31			54.07			67.69
Pass (n=6)			262.00			10.66			50.67

True Belief Verbal
Fail (n=9)				126.67			83.55			233.11
Pass(n=23)			71.82				52.52			265.04

How to Characterise Changes in Knowledge?

1. Graded Representations: (Munakata et al., 1997)
•	Knowledge develops in a piecemeal fashion and, like a PDP network, in terms of connection strength (i.e., the strength of connectivity between neurons)
•	Mismatches between reaching and looking because looking requires weaker internal representations

Time 1:

	

Time 2:

2. Implicit-Explicit 1: Baars (1986)
•	Other parts of the brain take the output of a second network as input

3. Implicit-Explicit 2: Dennett (1993)
•	Language allows one to “skeletonise” the output of a connectionist network (extract the essential knowledge – gist – without being cluttered up with details)  this allows new structured representations