For the past forty years Arthur Reber, Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center and Broeklundian Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College, has been studying implicit learning and unconscious cognitive processes by which the brain seeks to create and identify patterns. One instance of this phenomenon is when a speaker makes a grammatical mistake that the listener knows is wrong, but the listener cannot identify what grammar rule has been broken. They just "know" it is incorrect. In another example, certain people may seem peculiar when there is nothing about them that can be pointed to as the offending trait or action, something about the entire pattern of their presence seems strange.
Supported by the Cognitive Psychology Division of the National Science Foundation, Professor Reber's most recent work on this idea, which is researched using an Artificial Grammar Learning Task he has developed, has demonstrated that this type of non-verbal intuition functions at a high level in people with chronic brain damage, depressives, the highly anxious, and children with autism and Williams syndrome, suggesting that unconscious intuition remains intact even though other external mental functions like problem-solving ability and intelligence may be greatly diminished. A further outgrowth of the research shows that the mind might also react this way on questions of preference, which could have significant impact on numerous fields, including education and marketing. Whereas earlier theories have pointed to repeated exposure as a stimulus, Professor Reber's work shows that it is the exposure to repeated patterns that forms preferences for certain novel items that conform to these patterns. After frequent exposure to a certain class of objects, the unconscious discerns an underlying pattern and it becomes possible for viewers of modern art, for example, to appreciate new works of art and make distinctions between what is "good" and "bad" even though most viewers would be hard-pressed to verbalize why they like one piece of modern art over another.
* Adapted from 2002 Research Foundation Report