Learning | CBSE Class 11 Psychology Notes

This note covers the nature of learning, classical and operant conditioning, reinforcement, key learning processes, observational and cognitive learning, verbal and skill learning, factors facilitating learning, and learning disabilities.

What is learning, and how is it different from performance?

Definition: Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience. Behavioural potential means the capacity to show a learned response, even when it is not currently displayed.

Experience is central to learning. Repeated experiences can establish habits, but sometimes a single experience produces learning. A child who burns their fingers while striking a match learns to handle the matchbox carefully in future.

Learning is relatively permanent. Temporary changes caused by fatigue, drugs or alcohol do not count as learning. Stopping reading because one feels tired is a change in behaviour, but it does not establish that something has been learned.

Habituation refers here to the weakening of an orienting response during continuous exposure to a stimulus. A stimulus is an event that can produce a response; a response is an organism's reaction. The initial disturbance caused by nearby wedding noise may gradually fade.

This temporary change is distinguished from learning. The weakening response to continuing noise, the effects of tiredness and the effects of drugs should therefore not be confused with relatively lasting changes produced by experience.

How is learning inferred?

Performance is observable behaviour, an action or a response. Learning is inferred from it: an inference is a conclusion drawn from evidence. Reciting a poem is performance; successful recitation provides evidence that the poem has been learned.

1. Conduct a pre-test to find out which words the participant already knows.
2. Present a word list for a fixed period so that the participant can study it.
3. Allow the information to be processed and new knowledge to be acquired.
4. After some time, ask the participant to recall the information.
5. Compare recall with the pre-test to infer whether learning occurred.

A paradigm of learning is a method or approach used to study learning. The major forms include classical conditioning, operant conditioning, observational learning, cognitive learning, verbal learning and skill learning. These cover the acquisition of both simple and complex responses.

How does classical conditioning establish an association?

Classical conditioning is learning in which one stimulus becomes a signal for another. Ivan P. Pavlov investigated it while studying digestion in dogs. He noticed that dogs began salivating when they saw the plate in which food was normally served.

An unconditioned stimulus (US) produces a response without the particular conditioning being studied. Food is the US. The salivation it naturally produces is the unconditioned response (UR). This is a reflex, an automatically elicited response.

A conditioned stimulus (CS) acquires the ability to elicit a response through association with the US. A conditioned response (CR) is the learned response to the CS. In Pavlov's experiment, the bell became the CS and salivation to it became the CR.

What happened in Pavlov's procedure?

1. A dog became accustomed to a box and harness. A tube allowed saliva to be collected and measured.
2. The hungry dog heard a bell immediately before receiving meat powder.
3. The bell and food were presented in this sequence over repeated trials, meaning repeated occasions of the experimental procedure.
4. On a test trial, the bell sounded but no food followed.
5. The dog nevertheless salivated, showing that the bell had become associated with food.

Table: Stages of classical conditioning.

Here S-S learning means stimulus-stimulus learning; S stands for stimulus. One stimulus signals the possible occurrence of another. The plus sign in the table indicates the pairing of the bell with food.

The drawing shows a harnessed dog and labels a one-way glass wall, food, a tube from the salivary glands, a cup for measuring saliva and a recording device.

See Fig. 5.1 in your NCERT textbook

Conditioning also explains a child's fear of a balloon after one bursts loudly in their hands. The balloon becomes a cue for the noise and elicits fear. The association depends on the balloon and noise being experienced close together.

Which factors determine classical conditioning?

Acquisition means the development of a learned response. Its speed and strength depend on the timing of the stimuli, the type of unconditioned stimulus and the intensity of the conditioned stimulus. Different arrangements therefore produce different courses of conditioning.

How does the timing of stimuli matter?

The first three arrangements are grouped as forward conditioning procedures. Backward conditioning reverses the order of the US and the onset of the CS. “Very rare” does not mean impossible, and delayed conditioning should not be confused with trace conditioning.

What roles do stimulus type and intensity play?

Appetitive stimuli elicit approach responses, such as eating and drinking, associated with satisfaction and pleasure. Aversive stimuli, such as a loud noise, bitter taste or painful injection, are unpleasant or harmful and elicit avoidance or escape responses.

Appetitive classical conditioning is slower and requires more acquisition trials. Aversive classical conditioning is established in one, two or three trials, depending on the intensity of the aversive US. The type and strength of the experience therefore matter.

More intense conditioned stimuli accelerate acquisition in both appetitive and aversive conditioning. A stronger CS requires fewer acquisition trials. This factor concerns the intensity of the conditioned stimulus, whereas the difference between appetitive and aversive conditioning concerns the type of US.

How does operant conditioning differ from classical conditioning?

Operants are voluntary behaviours emitted by an organism and under its control. B.F. Skinner studied how their consequences affect them. Operant conditioning is learning in which behaviour is acquired, maintained or changed through its consequences.

In a Skinner box, a hungry rat can move around but cannot leave. A lever is connected to a food container. Pressing it releases a food pellet onto a plate. Initially, the rat presses the lever accidentally while exploring.

Across trials, the rat takes less time to press the lever. Conditioning is complete when it presses immediately after being placed in the chamber. The response is instrumental in obtaining food, so this is also called instrumental conditioning.

The drawing shows a rat inside a chamber with a barred floor, a mechanism on the chamber wall and connected apparatus beside the chamber.

See Fig. 5.2 in your NCERT textbook

A reinforcer is a stimulus or event that increases the probability of a response. Reinforcement is the operation of administering a reinforcer.

What are the main differences between the two forms?

In classical conditioning, the US both initially elicits the response and reinforces its association with the CS. Classical conditioning is therefore often called respondent conditioning.

Everyday operant learning includes children saying “please” to obtain favours and finding a hidden jar of sweets. The consequence helps establish the response. What the organism does is central to gaining the desired result.

How do reinforcement and its timing influence operant learning?

Reinforcement is the operation of administering a reinforcer. Reinforcers increase the rate or probability of preceding responses. Their type, number, amount, quality and schedule influence operant conditioning, as do the response being learned and the delay before reinforcement.

How do positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement and punishment differ?

Wearing woollen clothes to avoid unpleasant cold illustrates negative reinforcement. The removal or avoidance of discomfort strengthens the response. Negative reinforcement is not punishment: their effects on the relevant response differ.

Punishment does not suppress a response permanently. Mild and delayed punishment has no effect. Stronger punishment produces more lasting suppression, but sometimes punishment has no effect irrespective of intensity. The punished person may develop dislike or hatred towards the person administering it.

Primary reinforcers have biological importance for survival, such as food for a hungry organism. Secondary reinforcers, such as money, praise and grades, acquire reinforcing properties through experience. Shaping builds a desired response by reinforcing successive approximations, or increasingly close versions, of it.

How do amount, schedule and delay matter?

The number of reinforcements counts reinforced trials; the amount is how much is received on each trial; quality concerns the kind of reinforcer. Raisins or cake are compared with chickpeas or bread. Increasing these features usually accelerates conditioning to an extent.

A reinforcement schedule specifies when reinforcement is delivered. Continuous reinforcement rewards every occurrence of the desired response. Partial or intermittent reinforcement rewards some occurrences and omits others. Partial reinforcement produces greater resistance to extinction, the disappearance of a learned response after reinforcement is removed. Resistance means continued responding after reinforcement stops.

Delayed reinforcement produces a poorer level of performance. Children prefer a smaller reward immediately after a chore to a larger reward after a long gap. The timing of the consequence is therefore distinct from its amount.

What processes occur during conditioning and after reinforcement stops?

Extinction is the disappearance of a learned response when reinforcement is removed. Repeated presentation of the bell without food weakens conditioned salivation. Similarly, lever pressing gradually declines when it no longer produces food pellets.

Resistance to extinction means that an unreinforced response continues for some time. Increasing reinforced trials initially increases resistance, but after performance has stabilised, further reinforcement reduces it. A larger amount of reinforcement during acquisition also decreases resistance.

Delayed reinforcement during acquisition increases resistance to extinction, even though it produces poorer acquisition performance. Partial reinforcement also produces greater resistance than continuous reinforcement. Acquisition performance and persistence after reinforcement stops must therefore be distinguished.

How do generalisation and discrimination work?

Generalisation occurs when a learned response is elicited by a new stimulus. After salivating to a bell, an organism may salivate to a similar sound such as a telephone ring. The similar response reflects similarity between the stimuli.

Discrimination involves responding differently because stimuli differ. A child afraid of a person with a long moustache and black clothes may also fear a bearded person in black, yet show no fear of a clean-shaven stranger in grey clothes.

The first extension of fear shows generalisation; the absence of fear towards the different stranger shows discrimination. Generalisation and discrimination occur across kinds of learning, although they have been studied extensively through conditioning.

Can an extinguished response return?

Spontaneous recovery is the return of an extinguished learned response after time has passed, when the CS is presented again. The amount of recovery depends on the interval after extinction: a longer interval produces greater recovery.

The vertical axis shows strength of the CR and the horizontal axis shows trials. The curve rises during acquisition with CS and US, falls during extinction with CS alone, and rises again after a rest when CS alone is presented.

See Fig. 5.3 in your NCERT textbook

What is learned helplessness?

Learned helplessness is failure to attempt escape or persist after experiences of uncontrollability or repeated failure. Seligman and Maier exposed dogs to paired sound and inescapable shock. Later, the dogs failed to escape even when pressing their heads against a wall could end the shock.

In human experiments, initial failure regardless of performance is followed by little persistence and poor performance on later tasks. Learned helplessness is often measured through ability and persistence before giving up. Persistent depression is often caused by learned helplessness.

How do people learn by observing others?

Observational learning means acquiring knowledge by watching others. It is also called imitation or social learning. Modelling occurs when people observe another person's behaviour and emulate it, especially when they do not know how to act in a situation.

What did Bandura's experiment show?

Bandura showed children a five-minute film in which a grown-up boy behaved aggressively towards toys, especially a large Bobo doll. He hit it, threw it down, kicked it and sat on it. Different groups saw different consequences for this behaviour.

After watching, all groups entered a room containing similar toys. Their play was secretly observed. The findings distinguish knowledge acquired by observation from performance: whether the model is rewarded or punished influences what observers subsequently display.

How does observation influence social behaviour?

Children learn most social behaviours by observing and emulating adults. Dressing, arranging one's hair and behaving in social situations are examples. Children also reproduce ceremonies and household activities in their games, drawing on what they see in society, television and books.

Observation can contribute to aggression as well as courtesy, politeness and diligence. The status and attractiveness of models influence observational learning.

How do insight and latent learning demonstrate cognitive learning?

Cognitive learning involves a change in what the learner knows rather than what the learner does. Cognitive approaches examine mental processes during learning. They go beyond stimulus-stimulus connections and S-R associations, where S means stimulus and R means response.

What is insight learning?

Insight is the sudden understanding of a problem's solution. Kohler placed chimpanzees in an enclosed area with food out of reach and tools such as boxes and poles available. After moving around, a chimpanzee suddenly used these objects to reach the food.

In insight learning, a period without apparent progress is followed by a sudden solution. The learner understands a relationship between a means and an end, meaning between a way of acting and the goal it achieves.

Once understood, the solution can be repeated immediately when the problem returns. It can also be generalised to similar problems. The important change is understanding the relationship, rather than merely forming a specific set of conditioned associations.

What is latent learning?

Latent learning is learning that is not demonstrated until reinforcement is provided for displaying it. Tolman allowed two groups of rats to explore a maze. One group received food at the end and soon travelled through it rapidly.

The unrewarded group initially showed no apparent learning. When later reinforced, these rats travelled as efficiently as the rewarded group. Tolman argued that they had learned the layout during earlier exploration, before displaying that knowledge in efficient performance.

A cognitive map is a mental representation of spatial locations and directions needed to reach a goal. The unrewarded rats had developed such a map. Their later performance illustrates why a lack of visible improvement does not necessarily establish a lack of learning.

How is verbal learning studied, and what influences it?

Verbal learning concerns learning through words and their associations. It is limited to human beings. Experimental materials include familiar words, unfamiliar words, sentences, paragraphs and nonsense syllables, consonant-vowel-consonant combinations used as verbal material.

What are the main experimental methods?

In paired-associates learning, the first member of a word pair serves as the stimulus and the second as the response. Both are initially shown together. Later, the participant produces the response when shown the stimulus, receiving the correct word after an error.

Trials continue until every response is correct. The number of trials needed measures learning. Foreign-language equivalents of mother-tongue words can be learned this way. The following table gives examples of stimulus and response pairs.

In serial learning, items must be reproduced in their original sequence. The serial anticipation method presents an item as the cue for the next one. If the participant fails, the correct item is supplied and becomes the cue for the following response.

In free recall, participants recall a list in any order immediately after presentation. The list contains more than ten words, shown at a fixed exposure duration. Presentation order changes across trials. Items at the beginning and end are easier to recall than middle items.

How do meaningfulness and organisation affect learning?

Meaningfulness can be assessed through associations produced in a fixed time, familiarity, frequency of use, relations among words and dependence on preceding words. Longer lists, low association values and unrelated items increase learning time.

The total time principle states that a fixed amount of material requires a fixed amount of learning time, regardless of how that time is divided into trials. The more time taken to learn the list, the stronger the learning.

Category clustering means recalling words from the same meaning category together. Bousfield presented 60 words randomly, with 15 each from names, animals, professions and vegetables. Participants grouped words by category when recalling them, despite the random presentation.

Subjective organisation means arranging material in one's own way for recall. Verbal learning is usually intentional, but may also be incidental, or unintentional. A person may notice rhymes, shared vowels or identical starting letters without deliberately trying to learn those features.

How are skills acquired through practice?

A skill is the ability to perform a complex task smoothly and efficiently. Reading, writing and driving are examples. Skills involve chains of perceptual-motor responses, meaning responses linking perception with movement, or sequences of stimulus-response associations.

Practice and exercise develop skills. Successive attempts make performance smoother and less effortful. A performance plateau is a period when performance stands still during a transition between phases. Improvement resumes when the next phase begins.

What are Fitts' three phases?

During the cognitive phase, understanding the task places substantial demands on awareness. In the associative phase, repeated practice strengthens the links between inputs and appropriate actions. Performance becomes more accurate, but the learner still needs to concentrate.

In the autonomous phase, performance attains automaticity, meaning it proceeds with minimal conscious effort. This does not mean that the skill appeared without practice. Continued exercise produces the transition towards smooth, efficient and errorless performance.

The distinction between a plateau and a final limit is important. A temporary pause in improvement can occur between phases, followed by further progress. Skill learning therefore involves qualitative changes in the organisation of performance as well as gains in accuracy and speed.

How do reinforcement schedules, motivation and preparedness facilitate learning?

The partial reinforcement effect is the greater resistance to extinction of responses acquired through intermittent reinforcement. Continuous reinforcement produces a high response rate, but responding decreases quickly when reinforcement is withheld.

Partial schedules often produce very high rates of responding, particularly when reinforcement depends on the number of responses, called a ratio schedule. Because some responses already go unrewarded, the organism has difficulty distinguishing delayed reinforcement from complete discontinuation.

Why is motivation important?

Motivation is a mental and physiological state that arouses an organism to act to fulfil a current need. It energises goal-directed activity, which persists until the goal is attained and the need is satisfied. Motivation is a prerequisite for learning.

A hungry rat explores for food and learns to press the lever that produces it. A child searching for sweets learns the jar's location. In each case, a current need initiates activity through which learning occurs.

Intrinsic motivation means learning because the activity itself is enjoyable. Extrinsic motivation means learning as a means of attaining another goal. Enjoyment of learning and the wish to obtain good grades represent different sources of motivation.

What is preparedness for learning?

Preparedness concerns an organism's genetically endowed capacity to learn particular associations. Species differ in sensory capacities, response abilities and associative mechanisms. Their biological characteristics therefore constrain what stimulus-stimulus or stimulus-response associations they can readily acquire.

Preparedness forms a continuum, a range between extremes. At one end are associations easy for members of a species to learn. At the other are associations for which they are unprepared and cannot learn. Intermediate tasks require great difficulty and persistence.

A form of associative learning that is easy for apes or humans may be extremely difficult and sometimes impossible for cats and rats. Effort and reinforcement operate within these differences in biological preparedness.

What are learning disabilities, and what difficulties may accompany them?

Learning disabilities are a heterogeneous, or varied, group of disorders involving difficulties in acquiring learning, reading, writing, speaking, reasoning and mathematical abilities. It is presumed that these difficulties originate in problems with the functioning of the central nervous system.

The central nervous system refers to the brain and spinal cord. Learning disabilities may occur with or without sensory impairment, physical disability or intellectual disability. They may also occur in children with average to superior intelligence and adequate learning opportunities.

If not remedied, difficulties may continue throughout life and affect self-esteem, work, relationships and daily activities. Symptoms occur in different combinations irrespective of intelligence, motivation and hard work. A single uniform pattern should therefore not be assumed.

Which difficulties are described?

• Language and listening: difficulties writing letters and words, reading aloud and speaking appear quite frequently. Listening problems occur quite often, even without auditory defects.
• Attention: easy distraction and difficulty sustaining attention may occur. More often than not, attentional deficiency leads to hyperactivity, meaning persistent movement and activity.
• Space and time: common difficulties include getting lost, poor time judgement and confusion between right, left, up and down.
• Movement: poor coordination and manual dexterity, or skill in using the hands, can affect balance, pencil sharpening and handling doorknobs.
• Oral directions: understanding and following spoken instructions for activities can be difficult.
• Social understanding: children may misjudge relationships and fail to understand body language, the non-verbal signals expressed through the body.
• Perception: perceptual disorders usually occur. These may concern vision, hearing, touch or movement sensations, even when sensory acuity, the ability to detect sensory information, is present.
• Dyslexia: this difficulty involving letters, words and verbal organisation affects a fairly large number. Children quite often fail to copy letters and words, or distinguish items such as b and d or was and saw. They fail to organise verbal material.

Remedial teaching uses teaching methods designed to address learning difficulties. Learning disabilities are not incurable; appropriate educational techniques can correct most related symptoms and help children learn. Difficulties should not be explained simply as a lack of effort.

Glossary

• Learning — A relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience.
• Performance — An observable action or response from which the occurrence of learning may be inferred.
• Classical conditioning — Learning through association in which one stimulus comes to signal another stimulus.
• Conditioned stimulus — A stimulus that acquires the ability to elicit a response through conditioning.
• Operant — A voluntary response emitted by an organism that operates on its environment.
• Reinforcer — A stimulus or event that increases the probability of the response preceding it.
• Negative reinforcement — Strengthening an avoidance or escape response through removal or avoidance of an unpleasant stimulus.
• Extinction — Disappearance of a learned response after reinforcement is removed from the learning situation.
• Generalisation — Occurrence of a learned response when a new stimulus is presented to the organism.
• Discrimination — Responding differently to stimuli on the basis of differences between them.
• Spontaneous recovery — Return of an extinguished conditioned response after time has elapsed following extinction.
• Insight — Sudden understanding of the relationship that makes a problem's solution clear.
• Latent learning — Learning that remains undemonstrated until reinforcement is provided for displaying it.
• Cognitive map — A mental representation of spatial locations and directions needed to reach a goal.
• Preparedness — Genetically endowed readiness that makes particular associations easier or harder for an organism to learn.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: Every change in behaviour is learning. Correct: Learning involves relatively permanent change through experience; temporary changes due to fatigue or drugs are distinguished from it.
• Misconception: Learning and performance mean the same thing. Correct: Performance is observable behaviour. Learning is inferred, and latent learning may remain undisplayed until reinforcement is available.
• Misconception: Negative reinforcement is punishment. Correct: Negative reinforcement strengthens avoidance or escape responses. Punishment reduces or suppresses a response.
• Misconception: Backward conditioning can never occur. Correct: Acquisition under backward conditioning is very rare; this is weaker than a claim that it is impossible.
• Misconception: Continuous reinforcement creates the greatest resistance to extinction. Correct: Partial reinforcement produces greater resistance, because unrewarded responses have already occurred during acquisition.
• Misconception: An extinguished response cannot return. Correct: Spontaneous recovery can occur when the conditioned stimulus is presented after a period following extinction.
• Misconception: Learning disabilities necessarily indicate low intelligence or poor effort. Correct: They may occur with average to superior intelligence, adequate opportunities and hard work, and remedial teaching can help.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. Define learning and distinguish it from performance. [2 marks]

1. Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience.
2. Performance is an observed action or response. Learning is inferred from evidence such as performance rather than directly observed.

Q2. Food naturally makes a dog salivate. A bell repeatedly sounds immediately before food is given. Eventually, the bell alone produces salivation. Identify the unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus and conditioned response, explaining each. [4 marks]

1. The food is the unconditioned stimulus because it produces salivation without the bell-food association having to be learned.
2. Salivation to food is the unconditioned response because it is the reflexive response elicited by food.
3. The bell becomes the conditioned stimulus because repeated pairing enables it to signal the food.
4. Salivation to the bell alone is the conditioned response because it develops through the learned association.

Q3. Explain three determinants of acquisition in classical conditioning: time relations, type of unconditioned stimulus and intensity of conditioned stimulus. [3 marks]

1. Time relations matter: delayed conditioning is most effective. Simultaneous and trace conditioning require more trials, while acquisition in backward conditioning is very rare.
2. Appetitive conditioning is slower and needs more trials. Aversive conditioning is established in one, two or three trials, depending on the intensity of the unconditioned stimulus.
3. A more intense conditioned stimulus accelerates acquisition, so fewer trials are needed to establish the conditioned response.

Q4. Explain five influences on operant conditioning: reinforcement type, number, amount and quality, schedule, and delay. Treat amount and quality together. [5 marks]

1. Positive reinforcement strengthens a response through a pleasant consequence. Negative reinforcement strengthens a response that removes, escapes or avoids something unpleasant; it is different from punishment.
2. The number of reinforcements refers to reinforced trials. Increasing reinforcement number usually accelerates the course of conditioning to an extent.
3. Amount is how much reinforcement is delivered per trial, while quality concerns the kind of reinforcer. Increasing these usually accelerates conditioning to an extent.
4. Continuous schedules reinforce every desired response; partial schedules reinforce only some. Partial reinforcement produces greater resistance to extinction when reinforcement later stops.
5. Delay separates the response from its reinforcement. Delaying reinforcement produces poorer performance than providing it promptly after the response.

Q5. Three groups of children watch the same aggressive acts towards a Bobo doll. One sees the model rewarded, another sees the model punished, and the third sees neither consequence. All then play with similar toys. Identify the learning involved and explain the expected findings and their meaning. [3 marks]

1. This is observational learning: children acquire knowledge by watching a model's actions rather than having to discover those actions independently.
2. The group seeing the model rewarded is expected to be most aggressive, while the group seeing the model punished is expected to be least aggressive.
3. The contrast shows that observing behaviour provides knowledge, while rewards or punishments received by the model influence the observers' subsequent performance.

Q6. One group of rats explores a maze and receives food at its end; another explores without food and initially shows no apparent learning. When later rewarded, the second group travels as efficiently as the first. Identify the learning and explain the role of a cognitive map. [2 marks]

1. This is latent learning: the second group learned during exploration but did not demonstrate the learning until reinforcement was provided.
2. The rats developed a cognitive map, a mental representation of the maze's spatial locations and directions for reaching the goal.

Q7. Explain paired-associates learning, serial learning and free recall as methods of studying verbal learning. Give the task and procedure for each. [6 marks]

1. Paired-associates learning presents pairs of verbal items. The first item functions as the stimulus, and the second is the response to be recalled.
2. After pairs are studied, stimuli are presented separately. Correct responses are supplied after failures, and trials continue until all response items are given without error.
3. Serial learning requires the participant to reproduce a list in the same order in which its items were presented.
4. In serial anticipation, each item cues the next. If the participant fails to respond within the prescribed time, the experimenter supplies the correct item, which then cues the following response. Trials continue until all items are correctly anticipated in the given order.
5. In free recall, each word is shown for a fixed exposure duration, and participants read and speak it aloud. Immediately after the list has been presented, they recall its words in any order.
6. Free-recall lists contain more than ten words, with presentation order varied across trials. The method examines how participants organise words for storage in memory.

Q8. Describe Fitts' three phases of skill acquisition, showing how attention and performance change. [3 marks]

1. In the cognitive phase, the learner understands and memorises instructions. Cues, demands and response outcomes must be maintained in conscious awareness.
2. In the associative phase, sensory inputs are linked with appropriate responses. Practice reduces errors and time, although sustained attention and concentration are still required.
3. In the autonomous phase, attentional demands and interference from external factors decrease. Skilled performance becomes automatic, making minimal demands on conscious effort.

Key takeaways

• Learning is a relatively permanent change through experience, while performance is the observable behaviour from which learning is inferred.
• Classical conditioning associates stimuli; operant conditioning changes voluntary behaviour through consequences that follow the organism's response.
• Negative reinforcement strengthens avoidance and escape responses, whereas punishment reduces or suppresses the response it follows.
• Partial reinforcement produces greater resistance to extinction, and an extinguished response can return through spontaneous recovery.
• Observational learning provides knowledge of a model's behaviour, while consequences for the model influence the observer's performance.
• Insight involves sudden understanding; latent learning remains undisplayed until reinforcement is supplied for showing it.
• Verbal learning depends on material and organisation; skill learning progresses through cognitive, associative and autonomous phases.
• Motivation and biological preparedness influence learning, while learning disabilities may occur despite intelligence, opportunity and sustained effort.

Test yourself

Why does tiredness after reading not establish that learning has occurred?

Tiredness produces a temporary behavioural change. Learning requires relatively permanent change produced by experience.

Which classical conditioning procedure is most effective for acquiring a conditioned response?

Delayed conditioning is most effective: the conditioned stimulus starts before the unconditioned stimulus and ends before it ends.

How does shaping establish a desired response?

It reinforces successive approximations, meaning responses that become increasingly close to the desired response.

What distinguishes generalisation from discrimination?

Generalisation extends a learned response to a new stimulus; discrimination produces different responding on the basis of stimulus differences.

What is spontaneous recovery?

It is the return of an extinguished learned response when the conditioned stimulus is presented after time has passed.

What did category clustering reveal in Bousfield's experiment?

Participants recalled words in meaning-based groups even though the words had been presented in random order.

What does a performance plateau mean in skill learning?

Performance temporarily stands still during a transition between phases; improvement starts again when the next phase begins.

How do intrinsic and extrinsic motivation differ?

Intrinsic motivation comes from enjoying the activity itself; extrinsic motivation comes from using it to attain another goal.