Every year some new exciting technology is invented that pushes the boundaries of how, when, where and what can be communicated; each with its own unique operating affordances. However, the basic operating system of those who use these new systems, us humans, has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, we are always culturally adapting to new technologies and there is some evidence that our minds are structurally modified in response to these new modes of operating, but the fundamental underlying capabilities of the human mind, how we learn and why we learn has remained remarkably constant. This talk will discuss what we know about some of these fundamentals of human learning with particular reference to how to apply these understandings to users within free-choice settings such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
