LEARNING

LEARNING

1. What is Learning?

   • the process of acquiring, through experience, new and relatively enduring information or behaviours
     • observations, associations or thinking
   • Changing/adapting to our environment
   • learning is any enduring change in the way an organism responds, based on its experiences
   • learning is what allows us to adapt to our environment & to survive

2. Behaviourism

   • Definition: an empirically rigorous science focused on observable behaviours and not unobservable internal mental processes

3. Four Types of Learning

   • 1. Noticing & Ignoring:
     • Sensitisation and Habituation: Need to notice important events but learn to ignore events that occur repeatedly without consequences
   • 2. Learning what events signal
     • Classical Conditioning: a type of learning in which one learns to link tow or more stimuli and anticipate events
   • 3. Learning about the Consequences of our behaviour
     • Operant Conditioning a type of learning in which behaviour is strengthened if followed by a reinforcer or diminished if followed by a punisher
   • 4. Learning from others
     • Observation Learning
       • need to learn from the result of the behaviours of others

4. Associative Learning

   • when a subject links certain events, behaviours or stimuli together in the process of conditioning

5. Pavlov's Experiment

   • neutral stimulus = a certain sound, shining a light or a touch on the leg. things that don't often happen
     • after several of these pairings, he noticed the dog would start drooling just at the sound of the bell - even if there was no met around)
       • (Association Learning)

6. Non-Associative Learning

   • Habituation
     • decline in the tendency to respond to an event that has become familiar through repeated presentation. Can be long or short term.
     • e.g Loud snores being use to their own noise and not waking from it
     • as a result of repeated exposure
   • Learning that results from the impact of one particular stimulus (we learn to ignore repeated stimuli
   • Sensitisation
     • occurs when our response to an event increases with repeated exposure
       • often we become sensitised to repeated loud noises --> a baby crying