By Jennifer Chu

In a study published today in the Journal of Neural Engineering, the engineers identified tacit knowledge in volunteers who were tasked with classifying images of various shapes and patterns. As the volunteers were shown images to organize, the team recorded their eye movements and brain activity to measure their visual focus and cognitive attention, respectively.

The measurements showed that, over time, the volunteers shifted their focus and attention to a part of each image that made it easier to classify. However, when asked directly, the volunteers were not aware that they had made such a shift. The researchers concluded that this unconscious shift in attention and focus was a form of tacit knowledge that the volunteers possessed, even if they could not articulate it. What’s more, when the volunteers were made aware of this tacit knowledge, their accuracy in classifying images improved significantly.

“We as humans have a lot of knowledge, some that is explicit that we can translate into books, encyclopedias, manuals, equations. The tacit knowledge is what we cannot verbalize, that’s hidden in our unconscious,” says study author Alex Armengol-Urpi, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “If we can make that knowledge explicit, we can then allow for it to be transferred easier, which can help in education and learning in general.”

The study’s co-authors include Andrés F. Salazar-Gomez, research scientist at the MIT Media Lab; Pawan Sinha, professor of vision and computational neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and Sanjay Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor in Mechanical Engineering.