Abstract: 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.

Key words: implicit learning, consciousness, functional concept, explanatory concept, dichotomous consciousness, graded consciousness

摘要： 传统的内隐学习研究范式大多致力于意识与无意识加工的操作性分离。随着学习任务和测量手段的改进，越来越多的研究发现量化渐变比二元分离能更好地兼容实验数据。本文对认知领域中与二分和渐进两种取向相关的理论框架和实证研究进行介绍和评价，指出意识的二分与渐进假设是源自不同的概念定义层次的理论框架，即功能性概念和解释性概念，因而对现象学数据具有不同的解释效力。它们的共存提供了不同的研究视角，丰富了我们对内隐学习活动的认识。

关键词: 内隐学习, 意识性, 功能性概念, 解释性概念, 二分意识, 渐进意识