Starting from Zero: Task Learning in Completely Naïve Individuals

Aaron Wang, Lauren Williams, Oyindamola Ogunlade, Jorge Morales, Kishore Kuchibhotla

Abstract: Humans often learn about the world by observing, imitating, and receiving explicit instruction from others1–4. Even when learning via trial-and-error or reflection, human adults often do so immersed in a relevant context5–11. But what happens when most of this scaffolding is re-moved? How effectively can humans bootstrap learning in an information-and context-impoverished environment? In eight pre-registered experiments, we sought to understand how effectively humans learn from ‘zero’in a series of simple stimulusrecognition tasksthat sub-jects easily learned when provided with explicit instructions.When no explicit guidancewas provided, fewer than half of the subjects learned the taskdespite receiving trial-by-trial feed-back and monetary reward. Surprisingly, providing partial, explicit instructions about thestruc-ture of thetask—a ubiquitous pedagogical approach—did not improve performance nor re-duce individual variability. Instead, explicit instructions that constrained the action space (i.e.,valid key presses) partially recovered performance but still pointed to action inhibition as par-ticularly challenging to learn without explicit instructions. Our results suggest that individual differences emerge in impoverished environments without reflecting underlying capacity, and that a major driver of learning, even for the simplest of tasks, isa combination of luck andthe nature and quality of scaffolding available to the learner.