How translating “the groom is a hedgehog” actually helps your brain learn.
Sam Dalsimer, Duolingo’s global head of communications, told me this approach is based in part on research conducted by a team of psychologists from Ghent University in Belgium, which was published in—so I got in touch with the paper’s authors. Tom Verguts, a Ghent psychology professor who heads up the lab where the research was conducted, told me he’d never heard of Duolingo, and wasn’t aware that researchers there were familiar with his work.
Verguts’ paper studied what researchers in the field call “reward prediction errors”—the concept that learning happens when you encounter an unexpected outcome. There’s plenty of evidence that surprise helps rats or primates passively learn things like how to get a treat, but Verguts and his colleagues wanted to see whether reward prediction errors could improve humans’ ability to learn something intentionally, like new vocabulary.
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