Learning

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For most of us topic of learning brings to mind a classroom, whether elementary, high school, or college; lectures, biology labs; practice in long division or library research on the forest people of Africa. But learning encompasses far more than formal education. Indeed, it permeates every aspect of life, and not just human life at that. To a greater or lesser degree, all animals learn. Simple invertebrates live largely by genetically programmed reflexes, which prepare them to behave in given ways. But the more complex an organism, the less it depends on innate responses and the more it must rely on learning in order to adapt rapidly and appropriately to changing conditions. This means that the more capable of learning an organism is, the more adaptable it is and the more environments it can inhabit – as with humans, who populate the globe.

No matter what area of psychology we consider, learning plays a central role. Learning even seems to have a physiological effect: for example, animals raised in enriched environments – which promote exploration – tent to have more synaptic connections in their brains and are prepared to learn more readily than others.

Outside the schoolroom or the lecture hall, we can find innumerable instances of learning going on. If you get a stomach ache after eating oysters for the first time, you probably will not particularly want to go near them again: you have “learned” by simple association that, oysters are linked with stomach ache.

An abused child learns that withdrawal or abuse of others is an acceptable way, or perhaps the only way, to deal with fear, anger, or frustration. All through life we observe other people at school, in offices, at parties, at theatres, or in street fights and take in how the society around us expects us to behave in those situations.

Psychology’s exploration of learning in both animals and humans has among other things, given us insights into daily life; has enhanced formal education in a number of ways, from computer-assisted learning to reward systems that motivate children to set goals in writing term papers; and has formed the basis of therapies that help to free people with phobias and their terrors.

Learning comes about through experience. Historically behaviorists and cognitive psychologists have answered this question differently. Behaviorists have thought of learning as changes in observable behavior caused by environmental events. This goes along with behaviorism’s central tenet: learning is to be characterized only in terms of the organism’s history of external events and responses to those events; in this view, future behavior, can be brought about by controlling the environmental events that produce the learning of that kind of behavior.

Cognitive psychologists are more likely to describe learning in terms of changes in internal mental processes and knowledge. In this view, overt behavior is the result of processes that include perceiving stimuli, retrieving appropriate knowledge, anticipating events, and behaving accordingly.

How can the learning be defined so that the different approaches can be accommodated, at least to some degree? It is said that learning refers to a long-lasting change in an organism’s disposition to behave in certain ways as a result of experience. This definition excludes any changes caused by maturation or by temporary states like fatigue or illness.

In order to encompass the broad range of learning, psychologists have divided it into several types. There is habituation, a simple type of learning; associative learning, which includes the two kinds of conditioning, classical and instrumental, and covers such diverse topics as punishment and skill learning; spatial learning, focusing on our understanding of the location of objects in space and our own orientation in the physical environment; and observational learning, an area that illustrates the coming together of the behavioral and cognitive points of view.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27