Q.Two groups of rats explored the same maze; one group was rewarded with food at the end from the start, the other was not rewarded at all until much later. Yet when the second group was finally rewarded, it ran the maze as efficiently as the first group almost immediately. Identify and explain the phenomenon this demonstrates.

Cognitive learning refers to an approach that explains learning in terms of the cognitive processes that occur during it — that is, in terms of a change in what a learner comes to know, rather than only a change in what the learner outwardly does. This view is illustrated through two related phenomena: insight learning and latent learning.

Wolfgang Kohler demonstrated insight learning through a series of experiments with chimpanzees placed in an enclosed area where food was kept out of direct reach while tools such as poles and boxes were made available. The chimpanzees learned to use a box to stand on or a pole to reach the food — but crucially, this learning did not occur through gradual trial and error slowly reinforced over many attempts, in the way a rat gradually learns to press a lever. Instead, after a period of apparently unproductive roaming with no visible progress, the chimpanzees would suddenly perform the correct sequence of actions, as if the solution to the problem had abruptly become clear — a phenomenon Kohler called insight learning. Once the insight occurred, the solution could be repeated immediately and reliably whenever the problem recurred, and it readily generalised to similar problem situations, showing that what had been learned was not a specific chain of conditioned stimulus-response associations, but a cognitive relationship between a means and an end. …