learning

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learning

Psychol any relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a direct result of experience

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

learning

[′lər·niŋ]

(psychology)

The gathering, processing, storage, and recall of information received through the senses.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Learning

the acquisition of knowledge, abilities, and habits. In contrast to the pedagogical concepts of training, education, and upbringing, the term “learning” is used primarily in the psychology of behavior and embraces a broad range of the processes that make up individual experience. Among the phenomena classified as learning are habituation, imprinting, the development of the simplest conditioned reflexes and complex motor and speech skills, reactions in sensory discrimination, and intelligent learning (in humans).

Like “instinctive behavior,” “learning” is a fundamental concept of ethology that refers to the adaptation of an animal to its environment by changes in its innate behavior. There are two basic forms of learning: obligatory learning (mainly imprinting), which is characteristic of all individuals of a given species; and facultative learning (chiefly habit, and, to some degree, imitation), which is characteristic of the behavior of some individuals and depends on the specific conditions of their lives.

An enormous number of experiments, many of them conducted on animals in the USA within the framework of behaviorism, have been devoted to the processes of learning. Attention has been focused on elucidating the influence of various factors on learning, including the number and distribution of repetitions, reinforcement (the law of effect), the type of conditioning of responses, and dependency on the state of need. More complex are the problems of the transfer of the results of learning to conditions that differ from those in the original learning situation, latent learning, and the formation of sensorimotor structures and sensory syntheses that function as the internal variables of behavior, or its psychological links.

Most research on learning, which is usually defined as adaptation to the conditions created in the experiment, has concentrated on the simplest, “passive” forms of acquiring habits, including sensory and mental ones. Therefore, the results of this research cannot be extended to forms of learning that are specific to humans. The historical experience of mankind is transmitted to certain persons by means of education, one of society’s most important functions, which is entrusted specifically to schools and other pedagogical institutions.

REFERENCES

Eksperimental’naia psikhologiia, issue 4. Edited by P. Fraisse and J. Piaget. Moscow, 1973.
Thorndike, E. L. The Psychology of Learning. New York, 1921.
Hilgard, E. R. , and D. G. Marquis. Conditioning and Learning. New York-London, 1940.
Skinner, B. F. Verbal Behavior. New York, 1957.
Thorpe, W. H. Learning and Instinct in Animals. London, 1963.

A. N. LEONT’EV

References in periodicals archive ?

"For instance, if they are using implicit learning more, that means they're more likely relying on positive feedback, and we could modify their learning to take advantage of that."

Brain Waves Reflect Different Types of Learning

As participants arrived for the study, they were block randomly assigned to one of six conditions: implicit learning with physical practice, implicit learning with mental practice, implicit learning with no practice, explicit learning with physical practice, explicit learning with mental practice, and explicit learning with no practice.

Impact of type of learning and type of practice on a predictive serial reaction time task

Olson, "Perceptual Constraints on Implicit Learning of Spatial Context," Visual Cognition 9 (3) (2002): 273-302.

Lethal theory: some implications

Implicit learning is concerned with surface features of the material.

Morphosyntactic learning: a neurobehavioral perspective

These instructions could result in implicit learning of important perceptual information and its consequences for the preparation of one's own movement, because attention will be paid to the environment and not the processing of explicit hypotheses (Wulf & Weigelt, 1997).

Discovery learning in sports: implicit or explicit processes?

The utility of implicit learning in the teaching of rules.

Modificaciones del paradigma de gramaticas artificiales para ninos

Overall, Bright and Freedman claimed that their results indicated that a separate implicit learning mechanism may not be present in Masters' study.

Implicit and explicit control of motor actions: revisiting some early evidence

In an implicit learning perspective applied to mental retardation, the emphasis would be on problems in the learning of language itself.

Maternal speech to children with Down Syndrome: an update

Because of this limitation, implicit learning does not establish strong rational brand benefits in the consumer's mind.

Measuring affective advertising: implications of low attention processing on recall

Much of the research on learning without conscious awareness has been focused on complex rules or abstract tasks learned through a phenomenon defined as implicit learning by Reber (1967).

Use of an ESP cover story facilitates reinforcement without awareness

This final paper argues that apparent psi effects are in fact due either to implicit learning of non-random patterns in target sequences in cases of forced-choice ESP with trial-by-trial feedback, or to a coincidence of non-random calling with non-random target sequences in cases without trial-by-trial feedback.