CHAPTER 7 – LEARNING Forms of Learning

Perhaps the most significant of the gifts of man One-trial learning

is the capacity to learn. It is the foundation of
This form of learning seems to be shared even
his activities and the primary evidence of his
by the most primitive animals. It is a rapid
rational nature.
process of learning whereby we learn to react
Man's intelligence is measured by his ability to to a strong stimulus.
learn. Indeed, learning is the major task of the
For example a person may permanently avoid
individual from the time he is born to his adult
eating a specific food from his having
years and even beyond old age. Somebody
experienced food poisoning. Such a reaction
said, and very aptly, too, that we only stop
becomes permanent and strongly resistant to
learning when we die. Man does not stop
extinction.
learning for there is always something to learn.

Conditioning
Nature and Definition of Learning
The transfer of response from one stimulus to
Many definitions have been proposed; in fact,
another is called conditioning, and has since
every book in psychology has its own version of
been identified as a form of learning.
the nature of the learning process.
An examination of the different definitions
reveals certain common elements which can Classical Conditioning
become the basis of a working definition of the
term learning. Also known as Pavlovian or respondent
conditioning, is learning through association.
All the definitions are agreed that
In simple terms, two stimuli are linked together
(1) learning is a complex process; to produce a new learned response in a person
or animal.
(2) it produces a change in the behavior
of the individual;
(3) the change is relatively permanent; Example:
and that
(4) it is the result of the interaction of the
individual with his environment.

Learning – a complex process which produces

a relatively permanent change in the behavior
of an individual brought about by his interaction
with the environment.
Another experiment was performed by John B.
Watson and Rosalie Reyner. They decided to
teach Albert, an eleven month old boy to fear a
white rat.
He was not afraid of the rat originally. As a
matter of fact, he even played with it.
The experiment involved the following steps:
(1) Every time they presented the rat to
Albert, one of them would strike an iron
bar with a hammer behind his ear. This
made Albert jump. cry, and hide his face
on the mattress in which he sat.
(2) This pairing of showing the rat and
the sound was repeated many times.
(3) After the seven pairings, Albert
showed fear of the rat even without the
loud noise.
This fear seemed to generalize because Albert
showed fear of other furry objects like a rabbit,
a white dog, a sealskin coat or even a bearded
Santa Claus mask. (Wortman, Loftus, and
Marshall; 130)
The experiment may have its pitfalls, but the
experiment clearly shows that human beings
can acquire strong fears through classical
conditioning
A more recent example is the experiment of
Hygee and Ohman in 1978 cited in Baron
( 1989140), which involved adults and their
reactions to pictures of snakes.
These steps were followed:
(1) For the group undergoing
conditioning, each time a snake photo
appeared, it was followed by a mild but
unpleasant electric shock to the fingers.
(2) To the other groups, an equal
number of shocks were presented but
these were not paired with the snakes in
a consistent manner.
(3) Results
(a) Subjects who received a shock each
time they had the picture of a snake
showed signs of increased emotional
arousal even when these stimuli were
not followed by shocks.
(b) Those who received random shocks
did not demonstrate such condition.
In classical conditioning, the organism learns to
respond to a new stimulus in the same or
similar way it responds to the old unconditioned
stimulus.
Conditioned responses are usually associated
with incidents. Advocates of classical
conditioning feel that the basic processes
involved in conditioning can explain all learning.
Operant or Instrumental Conditioning
Operant conditioning, allows the learner to
discover how his behavior affects the
environment and vice versa.
The study of operant conditioning started with
experiments of Edward Lee Thorndike, an
American psychologist, which involved puzzle
boxes and used hungry cats as subjects.
A hungry cat was placed inside a puzzle box. paying attention to her only when she was not
Outside the box was food which served as the crawling on the floor. Within two weeks time she
reward for the cat if and when it could open the was playing normally with the other children.
door by pushing a button or pulling a string.
To determine whether the reinforcement was
After many trials, the cat managed to learn the the causative factor, the procedure was
responses instrumental in its escape. After reversed. They paid attention to her only when
several trials, the cat was able to perform the she was crawling about the floor. Within two
correct action as soon as it was placed in the days, she was back to her crawling about the
box. floor
Thorndike referred to this as trial-and-error
learning.
Observational Learning
From these experiments, he formulated the law
The fourth major way of learning is by watching
of effect. The cats had the tendency to retain
other people.
actions that were instrumental to their freedom.
Those that brought discomfort were not This is a very common way of learning and is
repeated. The cat's freedom and food served as part of our everyday activities. A new teacher
reinforcements in Thomdike's law of effect. learns a lot from watching old teachers do their
jobs. A child learns to play games by watching
other children play. Children learn a lot from
Perhaps the most extensive and systematic watching olders do the household chores.
experiments on operant conditioning were done
Observation and experiments have shown that
by B.F. Skinner.
imitative learning can be far more efficient than
He used two kinds of response - respondents conditioning. Learning by imitation is very
and operants. common in human learning.
Respondents - have reflexive responses that
can be elicited by a known effective stimulus.
Operants - are ordinary kinds of bodily
responses that an organism emits in the course
of his behavior without being stimulated by a
specific external stimulus.
Emotions, motor acts, values, and prejudices
are examples of responses.
Doing homework, playing chess, driving a car,
dressing oneself are examples of operants.
The following experiment shows how operant
conditioning can be utilized to change the
behavior of a child.
A three-year-old child had the bad habit of
crawling about the floor and resisted all effort to
make her play with other children. The teachers
tried to change her behavior and attitude by
Cognitive Learning
The last kind of learning to be discussed is
cognitive learning.
Cognitive learning in humans takes many
forms: perception of present events,
remembering past experiences, imagining,
daydreaming, thinking, reasoning, evaluating,
appreciating, abstracting, and other activities
which fall under what we term higher mental
processes.
In general, cognition refers to an organism's
mode of representing or evaluating its
environmental interactions to predict and
regulate subsequent interactions.
Insightful learning
Not all types of learning involve the stimulus-
response (S-R) process. The greater part of
learning involves a more intricate process than
just conditioning.
When an individual is faced with a new problem
situation, he may take two approaches to solve
the problem, namely, the trial-and-error and
insight.
The latter approach is more typical with human
reactions. When a person perceives a situation
that results in his discovering relations or a
reorganization of relationships, he has achieved
insight. his a form of discovery learning which
results in finding a solution and an
understanding of why it works.
Acquiring insight involves taking information
from the environments, analyzing, synthesizing,
formulating, and testing hypotheses, and either
accepting or rejecting the results into a
meaningful solution.
This acquisition of insight is best illustrated in
the experiments of Wolfgang Kohler
Concept learning
People learn to generalize symbolic responses
or concepts to represent similar stimuli or
situations. The learner classifies a variety of
related phenomena into a convenient,
meaningful category.
Concepts may be concrete or abstract.
Concrete concepts are ideas which can be
linked to a class of observable objects such as
house, book, furniture or a class of object
qualities as color, size, or shape.
On the other hand, abstract concepts are
those that cannot be directly linked to
observable objects or object qualities, such as,
for example, the physical concept of force and
work; the language concepts of parts of speech
as noun, verb, adjective, adverb; the
mathematical concepts of fractions, decimals,
percentages.
Of these two types of concepts, studies show
that concrete characteristics are generally
easier to form than abstract ones. The learning
of concepts involves generalization and
discrimination.
For example, a child learns the concept of dog
by noting the similarities among dogs; to use
this concept, however, he must discriminate
between dogs and other animals such as cats,
horses, carabaos, goats.
This generalization and discrimination are at the
basis of what are termed inductive and
deductive thinking.
Transfer of Learning
Another aspect of learning which has something
to do with efficient learning is transfer of
learning. This has something to do with
economy of learning.
Transfer of learning is said to have occurred
when a person's learning in one situation
influences his learning and performance in
other situations. If there were no transfer of
learning, imagine how difficult if would be to
teach every bit of information to be needed in
any new learning situation.
The Gestaltists who propounded the relation
theory maintained that insight into the situation
in all its relationships was the important thing in
securing general training.
Kinds of Transfer of Learning
There are two kinds of transfer, the positive and
the negative.
Positive Transfer - when what is learned in
one situation is appropriate to another, that is,
when it facilitates later learning or performance.
Negative Transfer - when the learning
interferes with later learning.

Theories of Transfer of Learning

How does transfer takes place? Several
theories have been advanced, criticized, and
discarded.
Among the enduring ones are the following:
theory of identical elements, generalization
theory, and the relation theory.
According to the theory of identical elements,
of which Edward Thorndike was the foremost
exponent, each individual activity is composed
of many precise movements and connections.
Transfer occurs to the extent that two activities
share in common in these composite elements.
For instance, in preparing for a career in
engineering, it would be well for a student to
study more his mathematics than he would his
French or German literature.
The generalization theory states that the
process of transfer is based upon an
understanding of the principle of generalization
underlying the responses made in two or more
activities. If the general principle is understood,
all the instances of the principle will be put into
perspective and readily understood.