Q.What is learning? What are its distinguishing features?

Learning is one of the most fundamental psychological processes, but psychologists define it precisely to separate it from other, temporary kinds of behavioural change.

Learning refers to the process by which an organism's behaviour changes as a result of experience. Psychologists define it formally as any relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience.

This definition has two important features built into it. First, learning always involves some form of experience. This experience can arise from a single memorable event — for instance, a child who touches a lit matchstick once learns immediately to be careful with matchboxes afterward — or it can build up gradually through repeated experience, such as learning that a bell ringing in a hostel after sunset signals that dinner is ready, after noticing the pattern on several occasions.

Second, the change produced by learning must be relatively permanent. This feature is what excludes several other kinds of behavioural change that might otherwise be confused with learning. Fatigue produces only a temporary drop in performance — someone who stops reading because they are tired has not lost their reading ability, and the change reverses once they rest. Drugs, sedatives, and alcohol change behaviour by altering physiological functioning temporarily, an effect that wears off. Habituation — the gradual weakening of a person's orienting reflex to a stimulus that keeps repeating, such as gradually no longer noticing continuous background noise — is also not learning, since it is a general decline in responsiveness rather than a lasting, experience-based change tied to a specific new behaviour.

A further defining feature of learning is that it is an inferred process, never directly observed. What can actually be observed is a person's performance — their response or action at a given moment. For example, if a person is asked to memorise a poem, reads it several times, and later recites it correctly, that recitation (the performance) allows an observer, such as a teacher, to infer that learning has taken place. Learning and performance are therefore not identical: a person may have genuinely learned something and yet fail to demonstrate it in performance at a particular moment, due to factors such as fatigue, low motivation, or anxiety.