Before humans enter any kind of formal education they are able to learn to identify everyday items like a “couch” or a “cat” just be running across them in their day-to-day life with absolutely no intent to learn what they are.
Authors of this new study stated that simple exposure to new objects make humans ready to learn. People often observe new things out in their day-to-day life without intending to learn about them. But the research demonstrates just observing the new thing in real life makes a person ready to learn about it later.
The study was created from five different experiments with 438 adult participants and all the experiments demonstrated similar results.
In one study participants took part first in an exposure phase in which they played a simple computer game that features colorful images of unfamiliar creates. They game gives no detail or context about the creatures. Unknown to participants, however, each creature was predetermined to belong to either an A Group or B Group.
Like in real life, the creatures that fit into either category shared common traits like somewhat different colored or shaped body parts. Control participants were shown a different set of creatures. Later in the experiment participants were put through a learning process where in they were taught how to categorize the creatures into two invented categories of creatures “flurps’ and “jalets.”
The results demonstrated that those who were exposed to the creatures initially learned how to categorize them much more quickly than the control group who played the computer game with unrelated creature images.