Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies of implicit learning have demonstrated spontaneous explicit learning in some participants but not others.We investigated whether differences in spontaneous explicit knowledge could be predicted by individual-level variables.Ninety-five undergraduates (Mage = 19.91, SDage = 1.5; Nfemale = 85) performed a Serial Response Task in which asequence was embedded in some blocks but not others; all participants demonstrated implicit learning (shorter RTs forsequence blocks compared to random blocks) but only 31 (32%) were able to describe the sequence accurately afterwards.Neither verbal nor non-verbal IQ, nor working memory span, nor Need for Cognition differentiated those with explicitsequence knowledge from those without. However, the relationship between sex and any explicit knowledge was signifi-cant (2(95) = 4.5, p = .03), and among participants with any explicit sequence knowledge, males correctly recalled moresequence items than females (Mmale, = 8, Mfemale, = 4.19; t(29) = 3.26, p =.0028).