Rules of Physics can be Learned Implicitly

Learning about one’s physical environment is an important task that must be accomplished early in life to be able to successfully navigate and operate. In an attempt to explain infants’ great success in this endeavor at such an early age, it has been proposed that infants are ready-equipped with some basic knowledge of physics. However, it is also possible that infants possess powerful learning mechanisms enabling them to implicitly learn rules of physics at a very young age. The two reported experiments were designed to answer this question. Participants were presented with the demonstration of object behaviors that followed a set of artificial rules. Both adults and infants implicitly learned the novel rules of object behavior well enough to predict and interpret the outcome of events.