Relational problems are not fully solved by a temporal sequence of statistical learning episodes

Clark & Thornton’s conception finds an echo in implicit learning research, which shows that subjects may perform adaptively in complex structured situations through the use of simple statistical learning mechanisms. However, the authors fail to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, subjects’ representations which emerge from type-1 learning mechanisms, and, on the other, their knowledge of the genuine abstract ”recoding function” which defines a type-2 problem.