LEARNING

LEARNING

1. At the time of birth every human baby is equipped with the capacity to make a limited number of responses. These responses occur reflexively whenever appropriate stimuli are present in the environment.

   • As the child grows and matures, s/he becomes capable of making diverse types of responses. These include identifying the images of some persons as one’s mother, father or grandfather,
     • As one grows older, one observes many events or objects, and learns their distinct features. Objects are categorised as ‘furniture’, ‘fruits’, and so on.

2. INTRODUCTION

3. NATURE OF LEARNING

   • learning is a key process in human behaviour. It refers to a spectrum of changes that take place as a result of one’s experience.
     • One must remember that some behavioural changes occur due to the use of drugs, or fatigue. Such changes are temporary. They are not considered learning.
     • Behavioural changes that occur due to learning are relatively permanent.
     • behavioural changes occur due to the use of drugs, or fatigue. Such changes are temporary.

4. COGNITIVE LEARNING

   • Insight Learning
     • In a normal experiment on insight learning, a problem is presented, followed by a period of time when no apparent progress is made and finally a solution suddenly emerges. In insight learning, sudden solution is the rule. Once the solution has appeared, it can be repeated immediately the next time the problem is confronted.
   • Latent Learning
     • In latent learning, a new behaviour is learned but not demonstrated until reinforcement is provided for displaying it.

5. VERBAL LEARNING

   • Verbal learning is different from conditioning and is limited to human beings. Human beings, as you must have observed, acquire knowledge about objects, events, and their features largely in terms of words. One has to keep on exercising and practicing. As the practice increases, improvement rate gradually increases; and automaticity of errorless performance becomes the hallmark of skill. That is why it is said that ‘practice makes a man perfect’.

6. TRANSFER OF LEARNING

   • General (Generic) Transfer
     • General transfer is not clearly conceptualised and defined in its details. However, prior learning predisposes one to learn another task in a better manner. The learning of one task warms-up the learner to learn the next task more conveniently.
   • Specific Transfer
     • Whenever an organism learns something, it consists of a series of stimulus-response associations. Any task can be understood as a chain of discriminable stimuli, each of which has to be associated with a specific response. Specific transfer means the effect of learning of task A on learning of task B.

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