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It may sound like every lazy school student\u2019s dream, but we really are able to acquire new knowledge without actively trying, a study carried out by researchers at Ohio State University has confirmed.<\/p>\n
The study is one of only a handful to provide experimental evidence that people can learn about objects they have never encountered before,<\/a> and aren\u2019t even trying to understand, simply by being exposed to them, they say.<\/p>\n To make the discovery, the team designed a series of computer game experiments to test participants\u2019 latent learning abilities.<\/p>\n In the first, they had the participants play a simple game involving colourful imaginary creatures. However, they didn\u2019t tell them that the creatures belonged to one of two categories based on different features such as hand and tail colour.<\/p>\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 This group of participants was then compared to a control group who had previously been asked to play a game involving a different set of imaginary creatures.<\/p>\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 post-doctoral researcher Layla Unger<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cParticipants who received early exposure to Category A and B creatures could become familiar with their different distributions of characteristics, such as that creatures with blue tails tended to have brown hands, and creatures with orange tails tended to have green hands.<\/p>\n \u201cThen when the explicit learning came, it was easier to attach a label to those distributions and form the categories.\u201d<\/p>\n The team then carried out a second experiment to determine the degree to which a fresh set of participants were able to learn how to recognise the difference between flurps and jalets during the early exposure phase.<\/p>\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. However, they were not told that one type of creature always jumped to the left and the other always jumped to the right.<\/p>\n If they were able to learn this during this 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 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 \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