Implicit Learning, Tacit Knowledge, Expertise Development, and Naturalistic Decision Making

Implicit learning involves the largely unconscious learning of dynamic statistical patterns and features, which leads to the development of tacit knowledge. This kind of learning is a ubiquitous, robust phenomenon that likely occurs in most, if not all, tasks in which individuals engage throughout their lives. In this paper, we argue that implicit learning and its end state, tacit knowledge, may assist in the acquisition, retention, and transfer of expertise and thus provide a form of tacit scaffolding for expertise development. The notion of tacit scaffolding represents a novel and interesting area of future research for the field of naturalistic decision making and naturalistic cognition.