Enhanced incidental learning

This chapter will focus on theory and research into enhanced incidental learning (EIL), which is an approach to facilitating learning from input. The chapter will draw comparisons between EIL and input enhancement (IE). Input enhance- ment (Sharwood-Smith, 1981, 1993) consists of overt increases in the perceptual salience of target items, and is intended to improve noticing. The possibility that input enhancement may only result in improved explicit knowledge will be examined. In contrast, EIL does not entail changes to the input itself, but covert modifications of the conditions under which the input is processed (Long, 2017). There will be discussion of existing empirical results which suggest EIL may give rise to implicit knowledge by means of detection rather than noticing.