Other Types of Learning: Learn It 2—Research on Latent Learning

Understanding the Research: Latent Learning

You just read that Edward Tolman discovered latent learning, learning that is not reinforced and not demonstrated until there is motivation to do so, through his research done with rats forming a cognitive map of a maze. Let’s take a closer look at what he did to discover this. In one of Tolman’s classic experiments, he observed the behavior of three groups of hungry rats that were learning to navigate mazes. Let’s break down the experimental process together. There were 3 experimental groups:

  • The first group always received a food reward at the end of the maze, so the payoff for learning the maze was real and immediate.
  • The second group never received any food reward, so there was no incentive to learn to navigate the maze effectively.
  • The third group was like the second group for the first 10 days, but on the 11th day, food was now placed at the end of the maze.

As you might expect when considering the principles of conditioning, the rats in the first group quickly learned to navigate the maze, while the rats of the second group seemed to wander aimlessly through it. The rats in the third group, however, although they wandered aimlessly for the first 10 days, quickly learned to navigate to the end of the maze as soon as they received food on day 11. By the next day, the rats in the third group had caught up in their learning to the rats that had been rewarded from the beginning. It was clear to Tolman that the rats that had been allowed to experience the maze, even without any reinforcement, had nevertheless learned something, and Tolman called this latent learning.

A sample maze showing blue doors and green curtains that made it even tricker for a rat to know how to navigate the maze.
Figure 1. The maze. As you can see from the map, the maze had lots of doors and curtains to make it difficult for the rats to master. The blue marks represent doors that swung both directions, which prevented the rat from seeing most of the junctions as it approached. This forced the rat to go through the door to discover what was on the other side. The green forms show curtains. These hung down and prevented the rat from getting a long distance perspective and it also meant that they could not see a wall at the end of a wrong turn until they had already made a choice and moved in that direction. The rat was always in a small area, unable to see beyond the next door or curtain, so learning the maze was a formidable task.