Obstacles Incentivize Human Learning: A Network Theoretic Study

The current paper is an investigation towards understanding the navigational performance of humans on a network when the ´landmark´ nodes are blocked. We observe that humans learn to cope up, despite the continued introduction of blockages in the network. The experiment proposed involves the task of navigating on a word network based on a puzzle called the word morph. We introduce blockages in the network and report an incremental improvement in performance with respect to time. We explain this phenomenon by analyzing the evolution of the knowledge in the human participants of the underlying network as more and more landmarks are removed. We hypothesize that humans learn the bare essentials to navigate unless we introduce blockages in the network which would whence enforce upon them the need to explore newer ways of navigating. We draw a parallel to human problem solving and postulate that obstacles are catalysts for humans to innovate techniques to solve a restricted variant of a familiar problem.