The Self-Organising Consciousness: A framework for implicit learning

The prevalent models of implicit learning have difficulty in accounting for the critical importance of the attention paid to the study material during familiarisation phase of a learning session. In this chapter, we show that a close examination of the on-line content of successive attentional focuses, which form subjects’ phenomenal experience, suggests a new interpretation of implicit learning. This interpretation is based on the fact that conscious contents are self-organising. We first present the notion of Self-Organising Consciousness in the context of the discovery of words in artificial languages, and then generalise it to the formation of other forms of conscious representations. We then discuss how the concept of Self-Organising Consciousness allows us to think in a non-standard way about the processes occurring in implicit learning situations, and even in situations involving some form of abstraction with regard to the surface features of the material. Finally, we discuss the meaning and the validity of introducing consciousness into a causal, computationally implementable framework.