Ch 5Learning — Class 11 Psychology, concept-first.

Learning is the process through which most human behaviour develops beyond the small set of reflexes present at birth.

Learning can be defined as any relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential that is produced by experience or practice.

Psychologists have identified several distinct methods, or paradigms, through which learning takes place, and different paradigms are suited to explaining responses of different levels of complexity.

Classical conditioning was discovered by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov while he was actually studying digestion in dogs, not learning at all.

How fast and how strongly a conditioned response gets established depends on several identifiable factors.

Operant or instrumental conditioning was first investigated by the American psychologist B.F. Skinner, who focused on a different category of behaviour from Pavlov's reflexes.

Operant or instrumental conditioning is a form of learning in which behaviour is learned, maintained, or changed through its consequences.

Certain psychological processes occur across both classical and operant conditioning whenever learning takes place: reinforcement, extinction, generalisation, discrimination, and spontaneous recovery.

A further form of learning takes place simply by observing others, without any direct reinforcement of the observer's own behaviour.

Not all learning can be explained purely in terms of associations between stimuli and responses. Some psychologists instead focus on the cognitive processes that occur during learning — changes in wha…

Wolfgang Kohler demonstrated a form of learning that could not be readily explained by ordinary conditioning.

A second form of cognitive learning is latent learning, in which a new behaviour is genuinely learned but is not demonstrated or displayed until reinforcement is provided for displaying it.

Verbal learning is a form of learning distinct from conditioning and unique to human beings, since it depends on language.

To study verbal learning under controlled conditions, psychologists typically use lists made up of nonsense syllables (meaningless consonant-vowel-consonant combinations such as YOL or RUV), unfamilia…

Verbal learning has been subjected to the most extensive experimental investigations of any form of learning, and these studies indicate that its course is influenced by a number of factors.

A skill is defined as the ability to perform some complex task smoothly and efficiently. Car driving, airplane piloting, ship navigating, shorthand writing, and writing and reading are examples of ski…

Skill learning passes through several qualitatively different phases. With each successive attempt at learning a skill, one's performance becomes smoother and less effort demanding; in other words, it…

Beyond the specific determinants already discussed for each individual type of learning — such as the timing of stimuli in classical conditioning, or the schedule of reinforcement in operant condition…

When reinforcement is arranged so that a target response is reinforced every single time it occurs, this is called continuous reinforcement; this schedule produces a high rate of responding while it l…

All living organisms have survival needs, and human beings additionally have growth needs. Motivation is a mental as well as a physiological state, which arouses an organism to act for fulfilling the…

The members of different species are very different from one another in their sensory capacities and response abilities.

Not every student who struggles in school does so because of low intelligence, poor motivation, or lack of opportunity.

Every year thousands of children get enrolled for education in schools. Some of them, however, find the demands of the educational process too difficult to meet, and they drop out.