To be able to support young children in learning to learn--an ability that requires adapting often-unprecedented changes in society--teachers need to be aware of the ways in which children understand learning. In this qualitative study, 177 micro-interviews conducted with 41 Finnish children were analysed using an abductive method to understand…

When observers search for a target object, they incidentally learn the identities and locations of "background" objects in the same display. This learning can facilitate search performance, eliciting faster reaction times for repeated displays. Despite these findings, visual search has been successfully modeled using architectures that maintain no…

We investigated the impact of readers' visuo-spatial (VS) capacity on their incidental learning of page links during the exploration of simple hierarchical hypertextual documents. Forty-three university students were asked to explore a series of hypertexts for a limited period of time. Then the participants were asked to recall the layout and the…

Memory improves when encoding and retrieval processes overlap. Here, we investigated how the neural bases of long-term memory encoding vary as a function of the degree to which functional processes engaged at study are engaged again at test. In an incidental learning paradigm, electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalps of healthy…

This experimental study evaluated the effectiveness of direct teaching of new vocabulary items in reading passages. The study compared vocabulary learning under a reading only condition (incidental learning) to learning that is aided by direct communication of word meanings (explicit learning). Three levels of vocabulary knowledge (form recall,…

The results suggest that coding for storage in the short-term memory is effective when learning occurs under incidental conditions; however, long-term storage appears to be significantly affected by the intention to learn and the foreknowledge of a recall test. (MM)

Memory of incidentally learned material was investigated across three developmental levels in immediate and 24-hour delay conditions. First grade, sixth grade, and college students were assigned randomly within developmental level to one of four experimental conditions: Type I immediate, Type I delay, Type II immediate, or Type II delay. In the…

In two identical experiments, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to study course-appropriate prose learning materials under one of four experimental conditions (two levels of experience with objectives by two levels of possession of objectives). Achievement on objectives-relevant test items was significantly higher for possessors…