People Can Learn Without Paying Attention
Excerpt By Charnicia E. Huggins, Reuters Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Students sitting at rapt attention hoping to learn something new from their teacher may be surprised to know that a lot of their learning has already taken place. New study findings show that it may be possible to learn without paying attention.

For example, as an individual walks in the street without paying attention to cars that move in and out of sight, his or her sensitivity to the direction of the cars increases, lead study author Dr. Takeo Watanabe of Boston University in Massachusetts told Reuters Health. This increased sensitivity--or inadvertent learning--is key to helping him or her run away from an oncoming car, he said.

Watanabe and his team performed a series of experiments that examined whether or not an individual's awareness about or concentration on a subject is necessary in order for learning to take place.

Study participants were asked to identify two light gray letters that appeared in a rapidly changing succession of black letters, all of which were presented against a ``snowy'' background of dots that the subjects were told to ignore. Most of the dots moved in random directions, but 5% of the dots moved in a specific upwards or downwards direction. The number of these coherently moving dots, however, was too few to reach the study participants' threshold of perception and was therefore invisible, the report indicates.

Then, the participants were shown a background of dots in which 10% of the dots were moving coherently--a level that would in fact be noticeable to study participants, who were asked to identify the direction in which the dots were moving.

The researchers found that people who had already been exposed to the ``invisible'' dots moving in a certain direction in the letter identification experiments were better able to detect the ``visible'' dots moving in that direction, Watanabe's team reports.

These findings demonstrate that a stimulus does not have to be perceived for it to be learned, Watanabe said.

So if you play a foreign language tape at a very low volume while walking, for example, you may be able to learn how to pronounce words more correctly to some degree, even though you're not paying attention to the tape, he said.

SOURCE: Nature 2001;413:844-848.

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