Simply being exposed to unfamiliar things (new objects or animal species, for example) puts us in learning mode, as new research has revealed, and prepares us more to learn new things later.
Once we find something new, our brain is able to take advantage of a short learning period later to gain more knowledge about it. The new study should help scientists understand this type of subconscious learning or latent learning.
Much of the way we perceive different things in the world has to do with categorizing them, but the ways we learn these categories are often not explicit. For example, we learn that “cat” and “dog” are different categories, mainly for being exposed to cats and dogs, rather than sitting and teaching their details.
In this study, researchers wanted to learn more about how this incidental exposure contributes to us learning different categories.
“We often see new things in the real world without the goal of learning,” says Vladimir Sloutsky, a psychologist at Ohio State University.
“But we discovered that just exposing them makes an impression on our minds and leads us to be prepared to learn about them later.”
The team conducted five different experiments with a total of 438 adult volunteers. The researchers used a custom computer game to expose participants to unfamiliar fantastic creatures, which in some cases fell into two categories: cat-like and dog-like categories.
During the initial phase, participants were instructed to react as quickly as possible to a creature that jumped to a red panel on the left side of the screen or a blue panel on the right side. Unbeknownst to the participants, the side to which the creatures jumped was always the same as their category, and there were a couple of structures of different categories.
Although no one found out the “secret” categories at this early stage, the results made it clear that people who had been exposed to creatures in the early stages were able to learn the categories more quickly.
Later in the experiments, there was a period of explicit learning, in which the invented categories – ‘flurps’ and ‘jackets’ – were revealed to the participants. The teaching also involved explaining how to distinguish between creatures of the two categories (tails and hands of different colors, for example).
Examples of creatures used for experiments. (Unger i Sloutsky, Psychol. Sci., 2022)
Volunteers exposed to images of “flurps” and “vests” were much quicker to understand the differences between the categories of creatures, although they were not exposed to any kind of instructions. learning during the initial phase.
“Participants who received early exposure to Category A and B creatures could become familiar with their different feature distributions, such as blue-tailed creatures tending to have brown hands and orange-tailed creatures tending to have brown hands. to have green hands, “says psychologist Layla. Unger of Ohio State University.
“Then, when explicit learning came along, it was easier to attach a tag to these distributions and form categories.”
In experiment 5, the images of the initial phase were accompanied by one of the two randomly assigned sounds, and participants had to respond to the sound instead of the image, that is, they did not have to pay attention to the creature. .
Those volunteers who spotted “flurps” and “jets” during the initial phase with sounds did even better in the learning phase, suggesting that much of what was being absorbed was done on a subconscious level. The simple exposition was enough to start learning.
“Exposure to the creatures left participants with some latent knowledge, but they weren’t ready to differentiate between the two categories. They hadn’t learned yet, but they were ready to learn,” Unger explains.
Studies of this type of latent learning are rare, and future studies could expand the current analysis of adults to see the process in infants and children as well.
“It’s been very difficult to diagnose when latent learning occurs,” Sloutsky says.
“But this research was able to differentiate between latent learning and what people learn during explicit teaching.”
The research has been published in Psychological Science.