Book Review: About face. Jonathon Cole. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998. No. of pages 223. ISBN 0-262-03246-5. Price US$25 (Hardback).

✍ Scribed by Albert N. Katz

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 52 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199904)13:2<194::aid-acp595>3.0.co;2-k

✦ Synopsis

works by Mozart, for example ± by virtue of implicitly learning the underlying structure. They review evidence indicating that using the AGL paradigm, people indeed come to like grammatical strings more than non-grammatical strings. This is an idea that myself and Christopher Longuet-Higgins have taken further (not reported in the Handbook), by looking at which structures used in contemporary classical music (e.g. serialist music) are implicitly learnable. This is of relevance to composers if they want a structure put into their music to be appreciated by a listener.

Mathews and Cochran remove some of the arti®ciality from arti®cial grammar learning by giving the strings a semantics (normally the strings are just meaningless sequences of letters) and testing subjects according to their ability to generate in-principle interpretable strings (rather than simply classify grammatical and non-grammatical strings). They found that the use of conscious eorts to discover the rules and the explicit use of mental models had little impact on the quality of the generated strings, they argue because the generation relied on unconscious processes.

To summarise the Handbook, it provides an excellent overview and update on theoretical issues in implicit learning, focusing on research with the SRT task. The applied relevance of implicit learning is not salient in the Handbook, but I have tried to highlight the more relevant chapters above. I found it well worth the read, and anyone interested in the implicit±explicit distinction I am sure would ®nd likewise.