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Theories of Learning
By James Keightley of giggleberries
Learning is considered to be the acquisition of knowledge and skills through environmental experiences. This has attracted different psychological approaches to understanding the process of learning, which include the comparative approach of behaviourists and a cognitive perspective. Behavioural psychologists use experiments to explain how behaviour is learned by animals in order to generalize this to humans in an effort to understand the processes involved, whilst cognitive psychologists study behaviour so they can infer what mental processes are taking place. I will explain how these two approaches follow their own epistemological paths by using experiments to study behavioural in order to understand and theorise about the psychological processes of learning and will be making reference to specific research examples to illustrate each perspective. Behavioural approaches see people as biotic organisms, capable of learning through a process of responding to environmental stimuli. This is fixed in the belief that things learnt are exhibited through observable behaviour and that this continuity exists between humans and animals. Consequently, the comparative approach studies the behaviour of animals so they can understand the processes involved in learning and generalizes them to humans. The focus on behaviour was favoured by John WATSON (1913), who believed it was a more scientific method than traditional cognitive approaches and was influenced of Charles DARWIN and Ivan PAVLOV. WATSON reasoned that such methods of enquiry enhanced the ability of understanding the processes of learning and where more traditional cognitive methods had struggled. Ivan PAVLOV (1927) was central to demonstrating the relationship between behaviour and the mind. This is illustrated by his observations that dogs salivate from the expectancy of food, an unconditioned stimulus (UCS), and that evokes an unconditioned response (UCR) without any learning when a conditioned stimulus (CS) is presented. This is because UCS naturally causes the UCR (salivation), whereas a neutral stimulus (NS) of a bell sounding would not. However, by repeatedly introducing food (UCS) and the bell (NS) together, in a process called ‘pairing’, a bond would form between the UCS and NS, creating a CS (the bell) that would elicit the same response due to a sense of expectancy of food. It was realized that behaviour of animals could be learnt by a process of ‘classical conditioning’ and is enhanced by frequency and pairing, timing and similarities between stimuli. This capacity was generalized to humans by WATSON and supported by his studies with ‘Little Albert’, a child who he was able to re-condition to fear his pet rat by pairing it with a loud bang. PAVLOV’s behavioural studies furthered the understanding of the processes of learning and the significance of which is also extended by Burrhus SKINNER (1974). He demonstrated that we also learn from the results that our own behaviour has on the environment and that our behaviour is instrumental to the environmental outcome from which we learn. If our behaviour is positively or negatively reinforced or punished, we learn to either repeat or desist from it. This is known as, ‘instrumental conditioning’ and underlines the Law of Effect, which states ‘a response having a favourable consequence will be learned’. However, cognitive psychologists question the fact that complex processes can not be explained by an understanding of relationships between response and stimuli, and that the comparative approach has a shallow understanding of the biological processes of the mind. Their theory questions how we learn general relationships by claiming the learning ability of the mind is akin to the information processing of computers. This metaphoric understanding sees learning as our ability to process information received by our sensors and to organise it in to categories, enabling us to make sense of the world. William JAMES (1890-1950) brings to mind the necessity of such processes by claiming that the world would be, ‘a great buzzing confusion’, without the ability to learn categories. The cognitive perspective use experiments to study behaviour in order to infer the biological processes of how we integrate prior knowledge with environmental information to learn that common attributes belong together in categories. Bruner et al (1956) used an experiment involving cards containing artificial stimuli to demonstrate how we learn categories. He discovered that people learn by a process of ‘hypothesis testing’, which enables us to identify common attributes between cards so we recognize that they belonged together in the same category. For a hypothesis such as, ‘a category card has the attributes of two crosses and a circle’, participants test the hypothesis against each card displayed. They would reject those not possessing the correct attributes, but accept cards which hold the correct symbols and categorize them as belonging to the same card. He discovered, when using more meaningful and natural stimuli prior knowledge could interfere with learning, as it became increasingly difficult to consider all plausible combinations. However, the importance of prior knowledge has since been widely recognized as allowing us to perceive the connections between attributes that facilitates learning and has led to more natural experiments of behaviour that hold firmer ecological validity. Murphy & Allopenna (1994) explain that, ‘we do not try to learn all the attributes of a category’. They clarify the importance of prior background knowledge in learning by highlighting that categories have attributes that cohere and belong to a common theme, which facilitates how quickly a category is learnt. The importance that background knowledge can guide category learning is further illustrated by Tulving & Pearlston (1966), who demonstrate that learning a number of varying words is greatly assisted if we are able to recognize that they belong to meaningful (semantic) categories. Both perspectives follow the scientific tradition of using behaviour to evidence and provide useful insights in to the psychological processes involved during learning. Behavioural approaches believe learning is best understood from researching observable behaviour that is capable of providing data from which objective conclusion can be generalized to humans. The comparative approach seems to achieve this by providing a coherent claim supported by empirical evidence. Whilst WATSON refuted the ecological value of the cognitive perspective, arguing that it is not conducive to exploring metaphysical mental processes, he revised his own views and became sceptical and considers that learnt behaviour of rats and humans can not be understood without an idea of consciousness. WATSON’s revisionism may be viewed as lending credence to the questions posed by cognitive psychologists against the comparative approaches that learning can not be understood by response to stimuli alone. In general these two unique approaches appear capable of coexisting. However, whilst both acknowledge the value of behavioural studies, the question is raised as to whether learning can be understood purely by one psychological approach.
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This intel was contributed by Jimbob
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May, 2012
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