Passive exposure to a topic can accelerate learning. This was shown by a study on mice published in the journal. e-Life. Evidence supports the idea that watching movies in a foreign language can accelerate language learning.
Learning a new skill requires regular practice over a long period of time. But previous studies have shown that passive exposure can speed up this process. For example, watching movies in a foreign language or listening to music while learning to play a musical instrument.
But it is difficult to find out exactly what happens in the human brain during passive exposure. Therefore, in a new study, scientists conducted an experiment on mice. They taught the animals to reach for a reward in a specific location in response to specific sounds. Later, some of the mice were passively exposed to these sounds in their normal lives. These animals began to perform the task more efficiently and receive rewards more often.
Next, to better understand how learning might occur in the brain, the researchers trained and tested various artificial neural networks on a simulated version of the learning task. Neural networks are not a direct copy of the brain, but they can be used to generate hypotheses that can then be tested experimentally. Modeling results show that passive exposure to a stimulus forms the basis of its image in the brain. Active learning more quickly reinforces details left in the brain through passive exposure. In the future, the scientists plan to evaluate brain activity in mice during a similar learning task to test their hypothesis.
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