Learning without Awareness
Learning may be unconscious and happen even when people are not aware of their learning experience. The research comes out in the July 28, 2005 issue of Nature.
Researchers from University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the San Diego Veterans Affairs Health System had undertaken the study to find out if like animals humans could learn through habits formed even when they are actually not aware of doing so.
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Learning without awareness has been well demonstrated in humans. I searched for
"learning without awareness" psychology
in Google and got 471 returns. Here, the interest may be that the subjects had destruction in the hippocampus and related strictures. Thus they were (supposedly) unable to learn new memories. The research showed that they were able to learn a simple discrimination task, even though they could not remember having practiced the task.
The results seem to show that the simple discrimination learning used a different part of the brain (different module) from the hippocampus system. This study could not give evidence about processes in an intact brain, but we might speculate that the same modules are in use. What is learned with awareness becomes automatic with overlearning. Perhaps that reflects acquisition by other modules that function without awareness.
What functions without awareness may be hard to access when the awareness modules try to change it. I have made some suggestions about that in the Thinkerer:
http://thinkerer.org/Tools/ToolsHabitClipit.htm
Researchers from University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the San Diego Veterans Affairs Health System had undertaken the study to find out if like animals humans could learn through habits formed even when they are actually not aware of doing so.
----------
Learning without awareness has been well demonstrated in humans. I searched for
"learning without awareness" psychology
in Google and got 471 returns. Here, the interest may be that the subjects had destruction in the hippocampus and related strictures. Thus they were (supposedly) unable to learn new memories. The research showed that they were able to learn a simple discrimination task, even though they could not remember having practiced the task.
The results seem to show that the simple discrimination learning used a different part of the brain (different module) from the hippocampus system. This study could not give evidence about processes in an intact brain, but we might speculate that the same modules are in use. What is learned with awareness becomes automatic with overlearning. Perhaps that reflects acquisition by other modules that function without awareness.
What functions without awareness may be hard to access when the awareness modules try to change it. I have made some suggestions about that in the Thinkerer:
http://thinkerer.org/Tools/ToolsHabitClipit.htm
posted by Selby Evans at 9:07 AM
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