At Carnegie Mellon, he subsequently completed his PhD under the supervision of James McClelland in 1991, on modelling of implicit sequence learning by means of artificial neural networks.
His work, broadly situated within the area of consciousness research, has focused on the nature of the processes underlying incidental (or implicit, or unconscious) learning.
[2] In 2000, he organized the association's fourth annual meeting held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.
He acted as editor of a book based on the meeting (The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation, Oxford University Press, 2003).
Axel Cleeremans appeared in the 2018 Netflix documentary The Most Unknown[10] on scientific research directed by Ian Cheney.