Implicit cognition

Implicit knowledge refers to unconscious influences such as knowledge, perception, or memory, that influence a person's behavior, even though they themselves take no conscious awareness whatsoever of those influences.

History

Implicit knowledge was first discovered in a year of 1649 by Descartes in his Passions of the Soul. He said in one of his writings that he saw that unpleasant childhood experiences proceed imprinted in a child's brain until its death without all conscious memory of it remaining. Even though this opinion was never accepted by any of his peers, in 1704 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his New Essays Concerning Human Understanding stressed the importance of unconscious perceptions which he said were the ideas that we are non consciously aware of yet still influence people's behavior. He claimed that people clear residual effects of prior impressions without any remembrance of them. In 1802 French philosopher Maine de Biran in his The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking was the first person after Leibniz to systematically discuss implicit memory stating that after enough repetition, a habit can become automatic or completed without any conscious awareness. In 1870 Ewald Hering said that it was essential to consider unconscious memory, which is involved in involuntary recall, as well as the development of automatic in addition to unconscious habitual actions.