Same Stimulus, Different Meaning: Why Your Learners Experience Your Training Differently
The smell of freshly baked cinnamon rolls drifts through a kitchen. For one person, it’s a pleasant aroma that triggers thoughts of breakfast; for another, it’s an instant transport to Sunday mornings at a grandparent’s house, complete with the emotional weight of childhood memories and people long gone. The sensory input was identical, the meaning couldn’t be more different.
This phenomenon sits at one of the many meeting points of neuroscience and psychology, and understanding it can help us design more effective training interventions.
From Stimulus to Meaning
When we encounter any stimulus, whether it’s light hitting our eyes, sound waves entering our ears, or the smell of baking wafting through a room, our sensory receptors convert that physical energy into electrical signals through a process called transduction (Purves et al., 2001). These neural signals travel to the brain, where they’re processed and interpreted. The crucial distinction here is between sensation, the raw detection of stimuli, and perception, the interpretation of those stimuli into meaningful experience.
Perception isn’t passive reception; it’s active construction. The brain doesn’t simply record what’s out there, it predicts what should be there and fills in gaps based on prior experience (Walsh and Mobbs, 2020). Our brains constantly generate expectations about incoming sensory information, compare predictions against reality, and update mental models when discrepancies arise (Clark, 2013).
The psychologist Frederic Bartlett demonstrated this in his 1932 research on memory reconstruction. When participants recalled an unfamiliar Native American folk tale, they distorted it to fit their existing cultural expectations, changing details to match British cultural norms and reorganising the narrative structure (Bartlett, 1932). Bartlett called these mental frameworks “schemas”, cognitive structures derived from prior experience that help us organise, interpret, and predict information.
Note: If you aren’t familiar with the idea of Mental Models, I shared an article last year that explores schemas and what they mean for us as L&D practitioners.
Our schemas don’t just affect what we remember; they shape what we perceive in the first place. People from different cultural backgrounds perceive the same visual scenes differently, with Western viewers tending to focus on focal objects while East Asian viewers attend more to contextual relationships (Nisbett and Masuda, 2003). Even how we segment continuous experience into meaningful events varies across cultures (Swallow and Wang, 2020).
What This Means for Learning Design
When we roll out training, whether it’s on compliance, leadership, or technical skills, every participant arrives with a different perceptual apparatus shaped by their unique life experiences. They bring different schemas for what “compliance” means, different emotional associations with authority and rules, different cultural frameworks for interpreting scenarios and examples.
Put simply, everyone that you meet, work with, and train has a completely different map of the world in their brain. It shapes what they perceive and what it means to them.
Consider compliance training. For someone who grew up in a household where rules were arbitrary impositions from capricious authority figures, compliance content may trigger defensive responses before it even begins. For another person whose professional identity is built around doing things properly, the same content might feel like an affirmation of their values. Neither response is about intelligence or engagement; it’s about the schemas being activated.
The same applies to examples we use in training. A scenario about managing household finances in a workshop on budgeting skills will land very differently for someone who grew up with financial security than for someone who experienced scarcity. The learning point might be identical, but the emotional and cognitive processing will differ substantially.
Note: There is an additional consideration to all of this, which is mental health conditions, many of which impact how people perceive and experience the world around them. This is an incredibly complex topic that I am absolutely not qualified to offer a meaningful opinion on, so I am not going to. But it is worth being aware within this conversation that mental health conditions can have a massive effect here.
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Practical Approaches for Bridging Perceptual Gaps
Given that we can’t control the schemas our learners bring, how do we design for this?
Surface assumptions before diving into content.
Before introducing new concepts, create opportunities for people to articulate their existing understanding and associations. This serves two purposes: it helps them become aware of their own schemas, and it provides you with insight into the mental models you’re working with. Simple techniques like asking “What comes to mind when you hear the word X?” or using brief reflection prompts can surface assumptions that would otherwise remain invisible.
Provide multiple entry points to the same concept.
Rather than assuming one example or metaphor will resonate with everyone, offer varied ways into the material. If you’re explaining a principle, illustrate it through different contexts, different analogies, and different scenarios. This increases the probability that at least one will connect with each employee’s existing schemas.
Make the implicit explicit.
When we assume shared understanding of terminology, cultural references, or “common sense” examples, we disadvantage anyone whose background differs from our own. Define terms that might seem obvious, check understanding of references before building on them, and be willing to explain the reasoning behind why something is important rather than assuming it’s self-evident.
Create space for divergent interpretations.
Rather than treating different reactions to content as problems to be corrected, design in opportunities for users to share how they’re making sense of the material. Peer discussion often surfaces the variety of interpretations in the room, which benefits everyone by revealing that there are multiple valid ways to understand and apply concepts.
None of this requires entirely personalised learning experiences for every individual. It simply asks us to recognise that perception is constructed, that construction is shaped by experience, and that experience varies more widely than we might assume.
Find some time today and consider what assumptions about shared understanding might be limiting how your training interventions land with different audiences.
References
Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (PAID)
Clark, A. (2013) ‘Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), pp. 181-204.
Purves, D., Augustine, G.J., Fitzpatrick, D., Katz, L.C., LaMantia, A.S., McNamara, J.O. and Williams, S.M. (eds.) (2001) Neuroscience. 2nd edn. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates. (PAID) - Newer editions of this textbook are available. I have referenced the second edition because that’s the one that I own.
Nisbett, R.E. and Masuda, T. (2003) ‘Culture and point of view’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(19), pp. 11163-11170.
Swallow, K.M. and Wang, Q. (2020) ‘Culture influences how people divide continuous sensory experience into events’, Cognition, 205, 104450. (PAID)
Walsh, K.S., McGovern, D.P., Clark, A. and O’Connell, R.G. (2020), Evaluating the neurophysiological evidence for predictive processing as a model of perception. Annalsof the New York Academy of Sciences, 1464(1), pp. 242-268.