Exposure to unfamiliar things, such as new objects or animal species, puts us in learning mode and prepares us to learn more about this new thing later, as new research shows. In other words, when we see something in our minds that we have no curiosity about, we both learn the basics at the same time, it also causes us to tend to learn about this situation and enables us to learn more easily.
When we encounter something new, our brain can take advantage of a short learning period to learn more about it later. The new study may help scientists understand this type of subliminal learning, or latent learning.
How we perceive different things in the world is largely about how we categorize them, but the way we learn about these categories is often unclear. For example, we learn that ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ are different categories, instead of learning about these animals by reading the details, basically by encountering cats and dogs.
In the study in question, the researchers sought to learn more about how such incidental exposure contributes to our learning of different categories. “In the real world, we often observe new things without the goal of learning about them. But we’ve found that exposure to them leaves an impression in our minds and prepares us to learn about them later on,” says Vladimir Sloutsky, a psychologist at Ohio State University.
The team conducted five different experiments involving a total of 438 adult volunteers. The researchers used a special computer game to expose participants to unfamiliar fantasy creatures, which in some cases were split into two categories, such as cats and dogs.
In the first phase, participants were told to react as quickly as possible to a creature that jumped onto the red panel on the left side of the screen or the blue panel on the right. One detail that the participants didn’t know was that the side the creatures jumped from was always the same as their category, and there were several different category structures.
Although no one was able to decipher the ‘hidden’ categories at this initial stage, it was clear from the results that people exposed to the creatures in the first stage were able to learn the categories faster.
The experiments then included an open learning period in which the fabricated categories – ‘flurp’ and ‘jalet’ – were explained to the participants. This “tutorial” also included explanations on how to distinguish between creatures in the two categories (for example, differently colored tails and hands).
Volunteers who were previously exposed to the ‘flurp’ and ‘jalet’ images were able to grasp the differences between the creature categories much more quickly, even though they were not exposed to any initial learning instructions.
“Participants with early exposure to Category A and B creatures may be familiar with different distributions of traits, such as blue-tailed creatures tend to have brown hands and orange-tailed creatures tend to have green hands,” says Ohio State University psychologist Layla Unger. When open learning came along, it was easier to add a label to these distributions and create the categories.”
In the fifth experiment, the first phase images were accompanied by one of two randomly assigned sounds and the participants were asked to respond to the sound instead of the picture. So, they didn’t need to pay any attention to the creature.
Volunteers who saw ‘flurps’ and ‘jackets’ with sounds in the initial phase still performed better during the learning phase, suggesting that much of what was assimilated was done at a subconscious level. So, a simple exposure was enough to start learning.
“Exposure to the creatures left some hidden information in the participants, but they weren’t ready to tell the difference between the two categories. They hadn’t learned yet, but they were ready to learn,” explains Unger.
Such studies of latent learning are extremely rare, and future studies could expand the analysis in adults to examine the process in infants and children as well. “It was very difficult to diagnose when latent learning occurred,” Sloutsky says. “But this research was able to distinguish between latent learning and what people learn during open education.”
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