He retired in 2005 but maintains a visiting professor position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and continues to work with colleagues and former students.
Those experiments[2] used the artificial grammar learning methods where participants memorize strings of letters that appear random but are actually formed according to complex rules.
[4][5] Independent of this point, the issues raised by decades of research have led to the growth of areas in the social sciences that have been determined to have unconscious cognitive functions as an integral element.
They include, among others: language acquisition, sport and motor skills, organizational structure, acquiring expertise, belief formation, aging, aesthetics, emotion, and affect.
Specifically, implicit processes should show little individual variation compared with explicit;[8] they should be operational early in life[9] and continue to function as people age.
[12] Reber maintains that human consciousness should be viewed as a pole on a continuum of subjective, phenomenal states that can be traced back to simple reactivity of organic forms and not as something special in our universe.
Reviewer Peter Kassan notes that the work is "solidly grounded in actual biology rather than fanciful speculation based on quantum mechanics, information theory, or science fiction."
[15] With František Baluška, a cell biologist at the University of Bonn, Reber is examining the various biochemical mechanisms that are likely candidates for the emergence of these kinds of sentience.
In collaboration with James Alcock, York University, Reber has returned to a topic that interested him decades ago, why the field of parapsychology still exists when, after over 150 years of effort, no paranormal effect has ever been reliably demonstrated.
An overview of gaming appeared in Gambling for Dummies (co-authored with Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger) and recently he published Poker, Life and Other Confusing Things, a collection of essays.
It follows the life of Xerxes ("Xero") Konstantakis, a Greek layabout with intellectual roots who is tugged at constantly by the world of carnivals, smoke-filled gambling halls, poker rooms and race tracks.