Learning

Understanding Learning

Learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or being taught.
It encompasses various types of knowledge, including declarative (facts, concepts) and procedural (how to do something).
Example: A child learning to multiply two-digit numbers (e.g., 23 x 45) requires both types of knowledge.
Declarative knowledge involves understanding the concept of multiplication, while procedural knowledge involves applying the algorithm to perform the multiplication.

Declarative Knowledge: Refers to facts and concepts that can be stated or declared, such as historical dates or vocabulary definitions.
Procedural Knowledge: Involves knowing how to perform tasks, such as solving mathematical problems or playing a musical instrument.

Explicit learning is a conscious process where individuals actively seek to understand and identify patterns in information.
It requires attention and effort, often involving hypothesis testing and structured learning scenarios.
Example: Learning vocabulary through paired-associate tasks (e.g., dog-chien, cat-chat).
Explicit learning is intentional, leading to conscious knowledge acquisition.

Learning grammar rules intentionally, such as adding 'ed' to verbs to indicate past tense.
Memorizing historical facts, such as the names of all the Kings and Queens of England.

Implicit learning occurs naturally and without conscious effort, often without the learner's awareness of the knowledge acquired.
Example: A child can pluralize 'wug' without being explicitly taught the rule, demonstrating implicit knowledge of language structure.
Studies by Reber (1967) show that participants can learn complex rules without being able to verbalize them.

Artificial grammar learning studies demonstrate that participants can recognize novel strings of letters that follow learned rules, even if they cannot articulate the rules themselves.
Results indicate that implicit learning can lead to above-chance performance in recognizing patterns, despite participants claiming they were guessing.

Incidental learning occurs unintentionally, often as a by-product of engaging in another task.
Participants are not explicitly instructed to learn, but learning happens through exposure to stimuli.
Example: Reading for pleasure can lead to the acquisition of new vocabulary without focused study.

Bisson et al. (2013) demonstrated incidental learning through reading comprehension tasks where new words are learned from context.
Saffran et al. (1997) showed that participants could learn nonsense words while engaged in a different task, indicating the ability to extract transitional probabilities from speech.

Explicit learning is conscious, intentional, and often verbalizable, while implicit learning is unconscious, unintentional, and typically unverbalisable.
Different memory structures are involved: explicit learning relies on the medial temporal lobes (hippocampus), while implicit learning engages more complex networks.

Case study of amnesic patient HM illustrates the distinction: HM could not learn new word pairs (explicit learning) but showed repetition priming (implicit learning).
HM was able to learn new skills, such as mirror tracing, despite his explicit memory impairments.