Ready to learn: Incidental exposure fosters category learning

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976211061470

Our knowledge of the world is populated with categories such as dogs, cups, and chairs. Such categories shape how we perceive, remember, and reason about their members. Much of our exposure to the entities we come to categorize occurs incidentally as we experience and interact with them in our everyday lives, with limited access to explicit teaching.

This research investigated whether incidental exposure contributes to building category knowledge by rendering people “ready to learn”—allowing them to rapidly capitalize on brief access to explicit teaching.

Across five experiments (N = 438 adults), we found that incidental exposure did produce a ready-to-learn effect, even when learners showed no evidence of robust category learning during exposure.

Importantly, this readiness to learn occurred only when categories possessed a rich structure in which many features were correlated within categories. These findings offer a window into how our everyday experiences may contribute to building category knowledge.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220527085221.htm

In the studies, participants first took part in an “exposure phase” in which they played a simple computer game while seeing colorful images of unfamiliar creatures. The game did not provide any information about these creatures, but for some participants, unbeknownst to them, the creatures actually belonged to two categories – Category A and Category B.

Later in the experiment, the participants went through “explicit learning,” a process in which they were taught that the creatures belonged to two categories (called “flurps” and “jalets”), and to identify the category membership of each creature.

“We 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,” Unger said.

“Participants 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. Then when the explicit learning came, it was easier to attach a label to those distributions and form the categories.”