Learning From The Unexpected

When the world around us is predictable and everything goes as planned, we let our guard down. This is because everything happens as we expect and we don’t feel any kind of surprise. But here is that when an event occurs outside our expectations, we pay as much attention as possible and, in some cases, we can learn from the unexpected.

It can be said that there is no learning without attention and that attention is more easily oriented towards what surprises us. The surprising event, therefore, captures our attention or interest and is memorized more easily.

In this article we will find out what and how to learn from the unexpected. We will also discover that this ability is present almost from birth and that it is an alternative to the classical conceptions of learning. Indeed, some psychologists and educators consider it extremely important.

Learning from the unexpected: general concepts

Sometimes science doesn’t progress by following normal logic. Interestingly, the exact same thing happens in humans: learning from the unexpected is often much more effective than learning from observing a predictable world.

Following this reasoning, researchers Stahl, A. and Feigenson, L. (2015) published an article in the journal Science in which they describe this phenomenon. They also explain that 11-month-olds get bored when the world and objects around them are predictable.

The authors observed that children quickly stop paying attention to a ball that is moving predictably. Instead, they focused on a ball that was moving in an unusual way, even crossing walls. Let’s look at this phenomenon in more detail.

We are born scientists: what to learn from the unexpected

At birth , our behavior resembles that of scientists. The children who participated in the aforementioned study did not limit themselves to learning from the unexpected (as happened with the ball that went through the walls), but also wanted to immediately experiment with objects with unexpected behavior.

Just as scientists want to test their hypotheses to understand what happens when they observe a certain phenomenon, children behave in a similar way with what they observe.

For example, when children saw a ball go through a wall, they tried to catch it. Once they had it in their hands, they squeezed and hit it. Did they want to verify that it was a solid object? Did they want to rehearse with that ball?

In another experimental condition, the children saw a ball move and pass through a hole, but without falling into it. Anyone would have expected the ball to fall through the hole, but it didn’t. It was a totally unexpected situation for the children.

In this case, as soon as they had the opportunity, they approached the ball and started experimenting  by throwing it several times to the ground, as if they wanted to check if it obeyed the laws of gravity. Isn’t that amazing?

The mysteries of unexpected learning

For science, the mysteries why children learn from the unexpected are still far from being explained. How do they do it? Is there in the human being an innate programming for understanding the laws of physics? This argument would generate a heated debate between innatists and environmentalists. Who will be right?

Children seem to detect that which defies the laws of physics. But not only that: they also tend to explore and try to “physically” understand unexpected events.

The cited study appears to demonstrate the existence of innate physical laws, as it is extremely unlikely that children can make logical-causal inferences that would require advanced reasoning skills.

Conclusions on the phenomenon of unexpected learning

As the above study points out, the main conclusions about the human ability to learn from the unexpected can be summarized as follows:

• Children try to learn more about things that are new to them, about what is unexpected and what falls short of their expectations.

• They seem to distinguish between what is predictable and what is unexpected. Obviously, they pay more attention to the latter cases.

• Children show themselves capable of making predictions about what will happen to an object, so that if something they think will happen does not happen, they will be surprised and will continue to investigate the phenomenon.

• When their predictions of events turn out to be different from reality, children explore that dissonance to learn more about the world around them.

It is clear that until now we have underestimated the human learning capacity, given that the skills necessary to learn from the unexpected are already present in children. In light of these data, will we remain anchored to the old paradigms?