Researches on implicit learning concern mainly whether the acquired knowledge could be processed consciously, thereby traditional paradigms devote much to operationalization of dissociation of conscious and unconscious processes. With the improvement of empirical tasks and measures, more and more researches have revealed the inability to obtain pure dissociation, and quantitative gradation, rather than qualitative dichotomy, appears to be more compatible with the empirical data. The phenomenology of selective compatibility reflects two different theoretical orientations on the conceptualization of consciousness in implicit learning researches: dichotomy and gradation. In this article main theoretical frameworks and empirical researches in cognitive science concerning the two orientations are introduced. As for the dichotomy framework, Global Workspace Theory appears to provide crucial theoretical guidance for researches in cognitive science, such as perception processing and implicit memory. It has also brought about considerable success in computational modeling. However, with measures of consciousness being more and more sensitive, the formerly assumed dichotomy system now suffers a failure to yield pure dissociations. Graded framework appears to take a stronger explanatory power, as a result of which a shift in theoretical orientation has emerged. The distributional representation theory and graded consciousness theory have elaborated on two critical issues in consciousness research: what is the global mental structure for consciousness and how conscious experiences arise. The distributional representation framework points out that for a representation to be consciously processed, it must have high-standard quality which can only be formed with a substantial accumulation of time in learning activities. Hence the ever-improving representations yield a demand of conscious processing along a graded scale. Otherwise the graded consciousness theory puts emphasis on conscious experiences characteristic of implicit learning. Conscious experience, or metacognitive feeling, concerns the subject experience consciously acquired in implicit learning, while the antecedent of the experience is absent from awareness. Conscious experience indicates an intermediate state in the consciousness continuum, which has obtained substantial empirical support in recent researches. It is concluded that, through an integrative analysis on the two frameworks, the dichotomous and graded hypotheses about consciousness are by no means contradictory. Chances are that they originate from different conceptualization level, i.e. functional concept and explanatory concept. A function-level conceptualization simply provides some detailed mechanism that could account for the specific function, while an explanation-level conceptualization exhibits a global structure that underlies such mechanisms as adopted at the function level. So it is reasonable to deduce that conception frameworks at the two levels exert different explanatory power on phenomenological data. Obviously the dichotomy framework mainly features function-level conceptualization and the gradation framework adheres to explanation-level conceptualization. Therefore the plight arising from the dichotomy logic, especially the difficulty to get pure dissociation in traditional researches, is now expected to be broken through within the graded consciousness framework. However, the co-existence of the two theoretical orientations provides us with different perspectives as to enrich our knowledge about implicit learning, and once effectively integrated in implicit researches, the two theoretical frameworks would shed light on a more significant understanding of consciousness.