Back in the 1930s, a psychologist named Edward Chace Tolman was interested in knowing how external features were internalized without any need for reward.  To that end, he worked with rats, and mazes. He devised ways to understand how we pick up information from the environment, internalize it, and display it—sometimes much later—when the need arises. He gave a name to this process of internalization: cognitive maps, taken to mean how we mentally represent the signals (e.g., words, objects, places) we gather from our context. For instance, as a teacher, you may intentionally make a point of using the phrase: “Excuse-me, can you repeat that, please?” in the English language learning environment very early on, when students are not even aware of how many words there are in this string. Students get the gist (conveyed by your gestures, most likely) and repeat to you whatever they originally said. After a short while, they will most probably be repeating that sentence back to you or to a peer without you having to “teach” it explicitly. This happened, most often, because they have listened to it many times over; they have understood when to use it, and as soon as the proper context arose, they showed you (and themselves) that they had processed the information that was intentionally present in the context and learned it—not even being aware of the fact. In cognitive terms, they have built up their knowledge repertoire and cemented useful information, in the form of a cognitive map, for later usage. This is latent learning and, as a teacher, you have orchestrated the inward learning of a very useful chunk.

Now let’s consider a different scenario: Recall how many times you had to explicitly teach the word “please” in the adult language classroom. I bet that you are having a hard time recollecting any. That is, most probably, because you are an excellent and polite user of the language and have used that same word so many times that students did not have to be prompted to insert it in their speech. Most likely, to you, it became evident that your students had properly learned how to use “please” whenever the situation ensued; and to them, it seemed just the natural thing to do. Implicit learning has taken place. In other words, by being exposed to a usage pattern concerning the word “please”—that to you was not a “learning goal” but just part of who you are and how you act—students unconsciously learned it and used the word when the need arose. Notice that here not being conscious of the input nor intentional about its use is key as the process becomes automatic, or one where knowledge has become tacit.