Toward an "Awareness" of the Relationship between Task Performance and Own Verbal Accounts of that Performance

The existence of learning without awareness has been debated for many years. Learning without awareness is said to occur when an individual's behavior has been affected without that individual being aware of the conditions affecting the behavior, of the relationship between those conditions and the behavior, or of the fact that the behavior has changed. This paper describes a series of experiments investigating this phenomenon. The findings support the existence of "learning without awareness." However, it is argued that the term "awareness" should be discarded as it is misleading. Instead, the results of the experiments are discussed in terms of behavior for which the individual does not provide a complete verbal account.