Investigating Retention in Passive Haptic Learning of Piano Songs

Passive haptic learning (PHL) is a phenomenon where one is able to acquire new motor skills through repeated haptic stimuli applied to the body without paying active attention to learning. In the following work, we investigated the retention of passively learned material compared to actively learned material. For the purposes of answering this question, we invited 20 individuals to learn a 10-note sequence actively and a 10-note sequence passively on a piano. The subjects were then tested 3 days later on their remembered material. There was no significant difference between passive and active learning when the subjects played the note sequences from memory. After being cued (auditory and visually) the participants were able to recall the passively learned note sequence significantly better.