Incidental learning is a type of informal learning occurring consciously with unintentional acts. Within the scope of this study, informal learning on a digital learning platform was examined in the context of cognitive load. The current study investigated the changes in incidental learning within two different scenarios: extraneous irrelevant…

The ability of the brain to extract patterns from the environment and predict future events, known as statistical learning, has been proposed to interact in a competitive manner with prefrontal lobe-related networks and their characteristic cognitive or executive functions. However, it remains unclear whether these cognitive functions also possess…

Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Recent studies have revealed that memory performance is better when participants have the opportunity to make a choice regarding the experimental task (choice condition) than when they do not have such a choice (fixed condition). These studies, however, used intentional memory tasks, leaving open the question whether the choice effect also applies…

Curiosity states benefit memory for target information, but also incidental information presented during curiosity states. However, it is not known whether incidental curiosity-enhanced memory depends on when incidental information during curiosity states is encountered. Here, participants incidentally encoded unrelated face images at different…

Vocabulary acquisition is a central component of second language learning. While there have been advancements in our understanding of the factors contributing to vocabulary acquisition in L2 students, it is still unclear how language aptitude is associated with the effects of task involvement load in this process. This study investigates the…

Researchers have investigated the promise of unimodal and bimodal input in enhancing vocabulary learning from meaning-focused activities. Compared to unimodal input, the simultaneous presentation of written and aural input in bimodal input has been argued to direct L2 learners' attention to words and enhance the form-meaning links for new…