Learning

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Psychology Class XI (Introduction to Psychology), Chapter 5.

Why does your mouth water at the word "pickle"?

Nobody taught you to salivate when you see a plate of mango pickle. Your mouth just does it. At birth you had only a few reflexes. Everything else, from recognising your mother's face and using a spoon to riding a bicycle, you picked up from experience. The salivation is a tiny, perfect example. This chapter explains how experience changes behaviour, in six different ways.

What counts as learning

Learning is any relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience. Two phrases carry the weight: relatively permanent and produced by experience. Learning can come from a repeated pattern (if the hostel bell rings after sunset, dinner is ready) or even from a single event (a child burns her fingers striking a matchstick, and learns to be careful).

Learning is inferred, performance is observed. You cannot see learning directly. You see performance, the observed behaviour or response. If you read a poem several times and can then recite it, your teacher infers from your performance that you learned it. A typical learning experiment mirrors this: pre-test, present the list, processing (learning happens), then recall, and the gain over the pre-test shows learning. A performer may have learned a piece well but perform badly on a nervous day, so learning can be there even when performance dips.

The six paradigms

Classical conditioning

Ivan Pavlov was studying digestion when he noticed that his dogs began to salivate when they saw the empty plate that usually held food. Salivation to food is a reflex. Salivation to an empty plate had to be learned. He designed an experiment: a dog was harnessed, a tube from its jaw led to a measuring glass, and a bell was sounded just before meat powder was given. After several pairings, the bell alone made the dog salivate.

This is S–S learning: one stimulus (bell) becomes a signal for another (food). Everyday cases are all around you. A child whose balloon burst loudly in her hands becomes afraid of the next balloon: the balloon is now the CS and the loud noise was the US. The sight of a sweet dish after a full lunch makes your mouth water, and that is a CR.

Pause and predict: a school bell always rings just before the lunch break, and now you feel hungry as soon as you hear it. Name the US, UR, CS and CR.

Check your answer: US is the lunch (food), UR is the natural hunger or salivation to food, CS is the bell, and CR is the hunger or salivation you now feel at the bell alone.

What makes conditioning faster or stronger. The time arrangement of CS and US matters most.

The first three are forward procedures. The type of US matters too: appetitive USs (food, water, caressing) bring approach responses and condition slowly, with many trials. Aversive USs (noise, bitter taste, electric shock, painful injections) bring avoidance and escape and condition in one, two or three trials. And a more intense CS means fewer trials are needed.

Operant (instrumental) conditioning

B. F. Skinner studied operants, behaviours that organisms emit voluntarily by operating on the environment. A hungry rat in a Skinner box moves around and, in exploring, accidentally presses a lever and a food pellet drops. Each time it takes less time to press the lever. Learning is complete when it presses the lever as soon as it is placed in the box. The lever press is instrumental in getting food, hence the other name for this type of learning.

Reinforcer: anything that increases the probability of the response. The consequence decides what is learned.

Negative reinforcement is not punishment. Negative reinforcement makes a response more likely, because it removes something unpleasant. Punishment makes a response less likely. Punishment never suppresses a response permanently. Mild or delayed punishment has no effect, strong punishment gives longer suppression but not a permanent one, and the punished person may come to dislike the one who punishes.

Pause and predict: a student starts doing homework on time because it stops her mother's nagging. Is this positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement or punishment?

Check your answer: negative reinforcement. The nagging (an unpleasant stimulus) is removed when she does her homework, so on-time homework becomes more likely.

What shapes operant learning. Reinforcement varies in several ways.

Shaping is reinforcing successive approximations to the desired response, step by step.

Partial reinforcement effect. Responses learned under partial reinforcement are far more resistant to extinction than those learned under continuous reinforcement. When reinforcement is continuous, you can tell at once when it has stopped. When it is intermittent, you cannot tell whether it has stopped for good or is just delayed, so you keep trying. That is why a game that pays out rewards at unpredictable moments is so hard to put down.

Classical versus operant conditioning

Processes common to both: the learning curve

The curve in one line: acquisition (CS + US, CR rises) → extinction (CS alone, CR falls) → rest → spontaneous recovery (CS alone, CR partly returns).

Resistance to extinction also depends on how the acquisition was arranged: it increases up to a point with the number of reinforced trials, decreases when the amount of reinforcement is larger, and increases with delayed or partial reinforcement.

Learned helplessness. Seligman and Maier first paired a sound with an unavoidable electric shock in dogs, then put them in a situation where they could escape the shock by pressing their heads against the wall. Having experienced inescapable shock, the dogs failed to escape and just suffered through it. In humans, continuous failure at tasks leads to little persistence and poor performance.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: learned helplessness is linked to depression, and persistent depression is said to be caused by it. In reality: it is better seen as one contributing pathway. Depression has many causes, including biology, life events and thinking patterns, and learned helplessness is one model that explains how repeated uncontrollable failure can lead people to give up. Why it matters: it explains why a student who fails repeatedly may stop trying even when the next task is easy.

Two views. For the exam: conditioning explains simple learning through S–S and S–R connections, while cognitive learning is about a change in what the learner knows. Another reading: later research showed that even classical conditioning depends on information: a CS works when it reliably predicts the US, not just when the two occur together. Most modern psychologists see the paradigms as complementary, not rival, explanations.

Observational learning

Observational learning (also imitation, modeling or social learning) means learning by watching others. Bandura showed children a five minute film in which a boy behaved aggressively toward toys, especially a large Bobo doll. There were three versions: the boy was rewarded and praised, punished, or neither (a comparison group). Afterwards the children were placed in a room with similar toys and secretly observed.

Observers acquire knowledge by watching the model, but performance depends on whether the model's behaviour was rewarded or punished. That is the key line: learning from watching is separate from showing it. Children learn dress, manners, politeness, courtesy, diligence and aggressiveness this way, and fashion advertisements use admired models for the same reason.

Cognitive learning

Here the change is in what the learner knows, not what she does.

Verbal learning

Verbal learning is limited to human beings. Researchers use nonsense syllables (consonant, vowel, consonant, such as YOL), familiar words, unfamiliar words, sentences and paragraphs.

Learning time rises with the length of the list, low association value words and lack of relation among items. The total time principle states that a fixed amount of time is needed to learn a fixed amount of material, no matter how many trials it is divided into. Bousfield made a list of 60 words, 15 from each of four categories (names, animals, professions, vegetables) and presented them in random order. Participants recalled the words category by category, which he called category clustering. Free recall is always organised subjectively, since each person groups items in her own way. Verbal learning is usually intentional, but you can also learn incidentally, such as noticing that two words rhyme.

Skill learning

A skill is the ability to perform a complex task smoothly and efficiently, such as driving, piloting or typing. It is a chain of perceptual-motor responses. According to Paul Fitts, skill learning passes through three phases.

At the change from one phase to the next, performance stands still. That flat stretch is the performance plateau. Practice is the only means of skill learning.

What helps learning

Motivation arouses an organism to act for a goal. It is a prerequisite for learning. You may study because you enjoy it (intrinsic) or because it helps you reach another goal such as marks (extrinsic). Preparedness means species differ in what associations they can easily learn, because of biological constraints. A kind of learning that is easy for apes or humans may be very hard, sometimes impossible, for cats and rats. It is a continuum from learning tasks that are easy, through those that are possible only with great difficulty, to those that cannot be learned at all.

Learning disabilities

Learning disability is a general term for a heterogeneous group of disorders involving difficulty in learning, reading, writing, speaking, reasoning or mathematics. The cause lies within the child and is presumed to be a problem with the functioning of the central nervous system. It occurs in children of average to superior intelligence, and with or without other handicaps. Remedial teaching helps, and educational psychologists have developed techniques for most symptoms.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: learning disabilities are not incurable, and remedial teaching helps. In reality: specialists generally describe conditions such as dyslexia as lifelong, to be managed with support, not cured. Reversing b and d is also common in every young beginner, so it signals dyslexia only when reading and spelling difficulty persists. Why it matters: the aim is not to "fix" a child but to give her the strategies that let her learn well.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Sensory, Attentional and Perceptual Processes explains how attention and perception decide which stimuli can become a CS or a cue worth learning.
• Next: Human Memory continues with how what you learn is encoded, stored and retrieved.
• Same book: What is Psychology? introduced Pavlov and Skinner in the story of behaviourism, and Motivation and Emotion deepens the role of motivation.
• Class XII link: Therapeutic Approaches uses conditioning and observational learning in behaviour therapy, and Psychological Disorders revisits depression.