Whether it’s learning an instrument, trying out a new sport, or even just gardening, mastering a new skill always requires practice. But what if we could also learn things even when we’re not actively trying?

Recent research from the University of Oregon has revealed that passive exposure to relevant stimuli can significantly enhance learning, even in complex tasks. Although the study was carried out on mice, it could also have implications for us.

In the study led by Christian Schmid, Muhammad Haziq, and their colleagues, researchers set out to explore how passive exposure to stimuli might affect learning in a task that requires active categorization. They used mice as their subjects and designed an experiment that revolved around sound categorization—a task where the animals had to distinguish between different frequency-modulated sounds.

The experiment was divided into several phases. Initially, mice were trained in a sound-categorization task that required them to identify whether the slope of a frequency-modulated sound was positive or negative. The training setup was straightforward: the mice would initiate a trial by poking their noses into a center port, at which point a sound would play. Depending on the sound’s slope, the mice had to choose one of two side ports to receive a reward.

Passive exposure is surprisingly effective

To test this, they divided the mice into three groups: one group received only active training (learning through practice), another group received both active training and passive exposure (hearing the sounds without having to respond), and a third group received passive exposure before they started any active training.

The setup was not special — it could have been anything else. The core idea was to divide the mice into one group that was trained, one that was not, and one that was only exposed to others’ training.

The results were striking. Mice that had any form of passive exposure to the sounds learned to categorize them more quickly than those that relied solely on active training. This was true whether the passive exposure was interleaved with active training or occurred entirely before the active training began.

One of the key findings was that passive exposure to the sounds allowed the mice to learn faster when they eventually engaged in active training. The performance of these mice improved more rapidly, suggesting that their brains were already familiar with the sounds, even though they had not yet practiced the task. This familiarity allowed them to focus more on the categorization task itself rather than on processing the sounds from scratch.

This suggests that introducing elements of passive learning—such as exposure to relevant information or stimuli outside of active practice sessions—could speed up the acquisition of new skills. For instance, language learners might benefit from listening to conversations or vocabulary in their target language even when they’re not actively studying. Similarly, musicians might improve faster by passively listening to music that they are learning to play.

“Our results suggest that, in mice and in humans, a given performance threshold can be achieved with relatively less effort by combining low-effort passive exposure with active training,” James Murray, a neuroscientist who led the study, told University of Oregon News. “This insight could be helpful for humans learning an instrument or a second language, though more work will be needed to better understand how this applies to more complex tasks and how to optimize training schedules that combine passive exposure with active training.”

The big caveat is that the study was carried out on mice. However, previous research has shown, for instance, that visualizing yourself playing a sport can help you get better. So if you want to learn something, getting immersed in it and exposing yourself to it can be a good way to enhance your skills. However, nothing can replace training — and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

The study was published in the journal eLife.