This may sound like every lazy student\u2019s dream, but we are able to acquire new knowledge without actively trying, a study carried out at Ohio State University has confirmed. <\/p>\n\n
The study is one of only a handful to provide experimental evidence that people can learn about objects they aren\u2019t even trying to understand, simply by being exposed to them. <\/p>\n\n
The Ohio State University team designed a series of computer game experiments to test the participants\u2019 latent learning abilities. In the first experiment, the researchers had the participants play a simple game involving colourful imaginary creatures. However, they didn\u2019t tell them that each creature belonged to one of two categories based on different features such as hand and tail colour.<\/span><\/p>\n\n They then moved the experiment on to an \u2018explicit learning\u2019 phase, where the researchers told the participants that the creatures belonged to one of two categories, \u2018flurps\u2019 or \u2018jalets\u2019, and taught them how to identify them. <\/p>\n\n The ability of this group to identify the flurps and jalets was then compared to a control group who had previously been asked to play a similar game involving a different set of imaginary creatures, without the defining characteristics. <\/p>\n\n \u201cWe found that learning was substantially faster for those who were exposed to the two categories of creatures earlier on than it was in the control group participants,\u201d said lead author and postdoctoral researcher Layla Unger. <\/p>\n\n \u201cParticipants who received early exposure to Category A and B creatures could become familiar with their different distributions of characteristics. Such as, those creatures with blue tails tended to have brown hands, and creatures with orange tails tended to have green hands. Then when the explicit learning came, it was easier to attach a label to those distributions and form the categories.\u201d <\/p>\n\n The team then carried out a second experiment to determine the degree to which a fresh set of participants was able to learn to recognise the difference between flurps and jalets during the early exposure phase. <\/p>\n\n This time, they were asked to hit a specific key as quickly as possible when creatures placed in the centre of the screen jumped to the left or right. They were not told that one type always jumped to the left and the other always jumped to the right, however. <\/p>\n\n If they were able to learn this during the initial stage of the experiment, then their reaction times would be expected to speed up as they would be able to identify the type of creature before it jumped. <\/p>\n\n This wasn\u2019t the case \u2013 they still required the follow-up explicit learning phase to accurately identify the creatures. However, they were able to identify the creatures more quickly than the control group, indicating that some latent learning had taken place. <\/p>\n\n \u201cThe exposure to the creatures left participants with some latent knowledge, but they weren\u2019t ready to tell the difference between the two categories. They had not learned yet, but they were ready to learn,\u201d said Unger. <\/p>\n\n \u201cIt has been very difficult to diagnose when latent learning is occurring,\u201d added the study\u2019s co-author Prof Vladimir Sloutsky. <\/p>\n\n \u201cBut this research was able to differentiate between latent learning and what people learn during explicit teaching.\u201d <\/p>\n\n New research is one of the first to provide evidence for a phenomenon known as \u2018latent learning\u2019 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