Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

"Howard’s research can help reveal the underlying mechanisms of new implicit learning tasks to determine not only how the learning takes place but whether there may be more effective ways of teaching people essential tasks."

When you turn on a light switch at home, how do you know where it is without thinking, and how do you know which way to get hot water as opposed to cold when you turn on the faucet?

Dr. Darlene Howard, Davis Family Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, investigates how the human mind absorbs subtle patterns and learns about the world indirectly. The recent bestseller Blink, written by Malcolm Gladwell, popularized this type of learning, calling it “rapid cognition . . . the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye.”

The study of implicit learning is a relatively new frontier in psychology but it has the potential to not only revolutionize how we understand our experiences, but to allow us to optimize approaches to learning new information.

“The learning we are studying is the kind that happens when people are just going about their daily business, when they are focused on living, not on memorizing or on learning per se,” Howard says. “This kind of learning has been called by various names including ‘learning by osmosis’, ‘thinking without thinking’, and ‘the adaptive unconscious’. It is involved in learning new motor skills such as bike riding, learning new languages, picking up new cognitive skills such as chess playing, and in developing intuitions about how other people will act. We think it is much more important for adapting to new places and people than more conscious forms of learning. But because implicit learning is outside of awareness, people typically don’t realize how important it is.”

Despite studies showing that implicit learning is essential for learning about many properties of our world and the people in it, historically declarative learning and memory (our ability to memorize facts) has received much more attention than implicit learning, both among the popular press and among researchers. This has occurred in part because implicit learning is a less obvious phenomenon, difficult to observe and measure. This style of learning is subtle, occurring without intention or conscious awareness that the learning is taking place. It is also not easy to explain. Often people can’t fully articulate what they’ve learned, even though they may have absorbed and retained significant amounts of information.

Howard and her colleagues in the Cognitive Aging Lab seek to unlock the secrets of implicit learning. Borrowing observation techniques from other areas of research and developing their own behavioral measurements, Howard and her collaborators use carefully designed testing situations to monitor the outcomes of the indirect absorption of patterns and information, allowing researchers to effectively quantify implicit learning.

In one of Howard’s studies, research participants take a computer-based test in which they need to respond as quickly as they can to a series of events that appear on the screen (patterns of moving dots appear and the subject is to move the cursor with a mouse to predict where the next “dot” will appear).

Unbeknownst to the participants, some of the events occur in a predictable location or pattern, whereas others are completely random. Most people in the study do not realize that some of the events are predictable; yet as they practice, they come to respond faster and more accurately to the predictable events than to the random ones, all the while unaware that this is happening. That is, they’ve adapted to a regularity in their environment without knowing it. People do this all the time in everyday life, enabling them to adapt to new homes, jobs, and people. Howard’s lab is working to understand how they do so.

Howard specializes in studying aging. Two major questions for this population are whether implicit learning declines with age and how implicit learning can be facilitated at all ages. These questions have important implications for older adults’ quality of life, especially when they make major life transitions.

Imagine a person in their seventies selling their home of 30 years and moving to a retirement home. In the familiar home, they know from experience how to operate the oven and how to get from their bedroom to the bathroom. How quickly can they adjust in the new retirement home? What is the best way for them to effectively familiarize themselves with their new environment? Howard’s research can help reveal the underlying mechanisms of such learning to determine not only how the learning takes place but whether there may be more effective ways of teaching people essential tasks.

Initially, Howard’s research and other studies suggested that during healthy aging declarative, conscious memory declined, while implicit learning was spared. Consider a comparison between a young college student and an elderly person, both moving to a new home: The elderly person is likely to have a hard time memorizing her new phone number while the college student can remember it easily. This is because the task of declarative learning—explicitly memorizing the phone number—is often more difficult for the elderly.

However, both the college student and the elderly person, after a few days of routine, would likely have little trouble going to the correct cabinet to retrieve a water glass without giving it much thought. At least this would be so if implicit learning didn’t decline with aging.

Howard’s more recent work indicates that while some forms of implicit learning are spared during aging, others are not. Her research has shown that there are multiple forms of implicit learning relying on different brain regions, which may be affected differently by aging. Howard and her collaborators are working to understand how aging affects these different learning systems.

The long-range implications of her research could lead to methods of teaching and learning that effectively help aging persons impaired by aging-induced neurological changes. “We want to understand which implicit learning systems are spared with aging and which aren’t,” Howard says of her intention. “We are working to understand how these are related to the changes in the brain that occur in the course of aging. And most important, we want eventually to figure out what can be done to help people of all ages adapt to changing environments, because this is an essential component of successful aging.”

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