example, the skilled footballer has method in the quick decisions involved in
passing the ball, developed by years of experience. One could analyze patterns of
play and show that good players make more appropriate choices to the context,
taking into account the state of the play when the ball is received. Experts refer to
this as "vision."

Why should fast-process but nevertheless systematic and goal-directed decision
making not appear to be strategic? Perhaps because it is intuitive or unconscious
in nature. However, if we examine the notion of conscious thinking a little more
carefully, we can see that it involves two important and distinct facets: awareness
and intentionality. If a process is expert but implicit and the person concerned
cannot verbalize the expertise in any clear way we may be reluctant to ascribe the
expertise to a strategy. That is the awareness aspect. The intentionality aspect
arises because we think that a person employing a strategy has some choice and
conscious control over what is to be done. For example, we think that the person
could try out one strategy and if it did not work, try another. Or we think that
strategies are things that can be explicitly taught to people. Certainly, in cognitive
psychology, researchers interested in strategies frequently manipulate their use by
verbal instruction. This implies that strategies are methods that can be described
and understood verbally and then adopted consciously.

In short, we use the term strategy to refer to thought processes that are
elaborated in time, systematic, goal-directed, and under explicit conscious control.
We also assume that strategic thinking is active and flexible: Individuals can
choose to operate one strategy rather than another when faced with a given type
of problem. They are not operating under the passive constraints of past learning.
The nature of strategic thinking as defined earlier has close connections with what
some researchers describe as explicit as opposed to implicit cognition. We
examine this distinction before proceeding to consider reasoning strategies as
such.

In the field of implicit learning, some researchers believe there is evidence for two
distinct cognitive systems, one implicit and the other explicit ( Berry & Dienes,
1993; Reber, 1993). I have discussed this work and its implications for the
psychology of thinking elsewhere ( Evans, 1995) and will describe it only briefly
here. The implicit system is characterized as being evolutionarily primary, shared
with other animals, inaccessible to verbal report, distributed and robust in the face
of neurological insult. The explicit system on the other hand is uniquely human,
associated with language and consciousness, and localized in the brain. Another
important distinction is that knowledge acquired implicitly tends to be context
specific whereas explicit knowledge can be transferred much more readily to

-2-