Latent learning, also known as “subconscious learning,” describes the human ability to add knowledge to one's knowledge through observation. We are so used to learning through external teachings that we do not notice how the brain actually works.
Every time our eyes rest on something, every time we observe and experience something, the information is assimilated by the brain. Our mind tends to categorize, to divide into similar categories groups of elements that are similar, or that have similar behavioral characteristics.
That's exactly what he's talking about the new studio di Vladimir Sloutsky, sociologist at Ohio State University. He talks about latent learning and man's ability to learn without teaching, only through observation.
We often observe new things in the real world without the goal of learning them, but we have found that simply being exposed to them generates a state of Curiosity in the mind that leads us to be ready to know them later.
Vladimir Sloutsky, Ohio State University
The latent learning experiment
The team of researchers conducted five different experiments, getting to involve 438 volunteers. All using a custom game, which shows participants unknown fantastic creatures, divided into categories.
In the initial stage, participants were asked to click as quickly as possible on the creature that appeared on the screen. The figures alternated on the right and left sides, reflecting the reference categories. These same categories remained "secret" from the eyes of the participants, so as not to influence the results.
In subsequent experiments, researchers have switched to so-called “explicit learning”. They showed participants the invented categories – 'flurps' and 'jalets' – and their differences.
Below is a small example of the figures, where A and C differ in some small elements.
Volunteers exposed beforehand to images of “flurps” and “jalets” were much faster at picking up the differences between the categories of creatures, even without having received initial learning instructions.
“Participants who received early exposure to category A and B creatures were able to become familiar with their different distributions of characteristics, for example that creatures with blue tails tended to have brown hands and creatures with orange tails They tended to have green hands."
(...)
“Then, when explicit learning came along, it was easier to attach a label to those distributions and form the categories.”
Layla Unger
Conclusions and considerations
In the last experiment, participants did not have to pay attention to the creature. The researchers accompanied the images of the initial phase with sounds, and asked the participants to focus only on the sound.
Also this time, the volunteers who saw "flurps" and "jalets" in the initial phase managed to obtain better results in the learning phase.
As the experiment aimed to demonstrate, simple exposure was enough to start learning.
However, as the psychologist reminds us Layla Unger, participants only began to learn: “Exposure to the creatures left participants with some latent knowledge, but they were not ready to distinguish between the two categories. They hadn't learned yet, but they were ready to learn." Studies on latent learning are still in their infancy, and need a few more tests to provide us with more accurate information.
Vladimir Sloutsky is however confident for the future.
“It has been very difficult to diagnose when latent learning occurs; but this research was able to distinguish between latent learning and what people learn during explicit teaching."
