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The performance of a group of psychiatric inpatients on two different cognitive tasks was compared with that of a control group of college undergraduates. The task in the first experiment was implicit learning of a complex, synthetic grammar; the task in the second experiment was explicit learning of relatively simple letter-to-number matching rules. In the first experiment, differences between the normals and the psychiatrically impaired were found on the preliminary memorization task but not on the implicit grammar learning task; in the second experiment, differences were observed on all phases of the experiment, with the inpatients performing no better than chance. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that, under appropriate conditions, individuals suffering from serious disorders may show no deficits when working with complex and abstract stimulus domains while showing serious …