There are numerous causes of amnesia, including stroke, injury to the brain, surgery, alcoholism, encephalitis, and electroconvulsive therapy. Contrary to the popular notion of amnesia—in which a person suffers a severe blow to the head, for example, and cannot recall his or her past life and experiences—the principal symptom of amnesia is the inability to retain new information, beg…
In the cognitive development theory of Jean Piaget, assimilation is one of two complementary activities involved in adaptation, the process of learning from and adjusting to one's environment. Assimilation consists of taking in new information and incorporating it into existing ways of thinking about the world. Conversely, accommodation is the process of changing one's existing ideas…
Avoidance learning is the process by which an individual learns a behavior or response to avoid a stressful or unpleasant situation. The behavior is to avoid, or to remove oneself from, the situation. Researchers have found avoidance behavior challenging to explain, since the reinforcement for the behavior is to not experience the negative reinforcer, or punishment. In other words, the reinforceme…
A concept is a generalization that helps to organize information into categories. For example, the concept "square" is used to describe those things that have four equal sides and four right angles. Thus, the concept categorize things whose properties meet the set requirements. The way young children learn concepts has been studied in experimental situations using so-called artificia…
Reflexive behaviors occur when an animal encounters a stimulus that naturally leads to a reflex. For example, a loud noise generates a fright response. If an initially neutral stimulus is paired with the noise, that neutral or conditioned stimulus produces a fright response. In classical conditioning, the response to the conditioned stimulus is called a conditioned response. Conditioned responses …
In Ivan Pavlov's experimentations with classical conditioning, a sound was paired with the placement of meat powder in a dog's mouth, and the powder naturally induced salivation. After the powder and the sound had co-occurred a few times, the dog salivated when the sound occurred, even when the meat powder was not administered. Although most research in classical conditioning has inv…
Psychology has often been defined as the study of behavior. As such, psychologists have developed a diverse array of methods for studying both human and animal activity. Two of the most commonly used techniques are classical conditioning and operant conditioning. They have been used to study the process of learning, one of the key areas of interest to psychologists in the early days of psychology.…
Psychologists have been interested in the processes of learning and forgetting since the early days of the discipline. The researcher who pioneered this field, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), invented the nonsense syllable in order to be able to assess "pure" learning, that is, learning free of meaning, and the rate at which we forget. He served as his own subject and learned an incr…
A typical experiment involving the use of words as stimuli may include unrelated or related words, single or multiple presentations of the words, and single or multiple tests involving memory. In a free-recall test, the learner organizes the information by memory, and the process of recall often reveals the mental processes that the learner uses. For example, words positioned at the beginning and …
Unlike behaviorist models of learning through various forms of conditioning, imitation occurs naturally without outside stimulus or reward. In a child's early years, an enormous amount of learning is done through imitation of parents, peers, and modeling based on other stimuli, such as television. Imitative learning occurs in primates, both human and nonhuman, but has not conclusively been …
Imprinting is the process that prompts ducklings to form an attachment to their mothers—or whatever other moving object that appears—within the first two days of life. Ethologists, scientists who study the behavior of animals in their natural environment, noted the process of imprinting as they observed newly hatched ducklings. They discovered that if a duckling were introduced to an…
The concept of learned helplessness was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Martin Seligman (1942-) at the University of Pennsylvania. He found that animals receiving electric shocks, which they had no ability to prevent or avoid, were unable to act in subsequent situations where avoidance or escape was possible. Extending the ramifications of these findings to humans, Seligman and his colleagues …
When a person is introduced to new information or a new skill, it may take several learning sessions to acquire that knowledge or skill. Psychologists refer to this acquisition process as the learning curve. In general, this term refers to the time it takes an individual to develop knowledge or a new skill. Behavioral psychologists have noted that the degree, or strength, of learning reflects thre…
A learning disability, or specific developmental disorder, is a disorder that inhibits or interferes with the skills of learning, including speaking, listening, reading, writing, or mathematical ability. Legally, a learning disabled child is one whose level of academic achievement is two or more years below the standard for his age and IQ level. It is estimated that 5-20% of school-age children in…
When people try to learn a new behavior, the first attempts are often not very successful. After a time, however, they seem to get the idea of the behavior and the pace of learning increases. This phenomenon of greater improvement in speed of learning is called learning-to-learn (LTL). There are two general reasons for the existence of LTL. First, negative transfer diminishes. When people have lea…
Psychologists have suggested a variety of theories to explain the process of learning. During the first half of the 20th century, American psychologists approached the concept of learning primarily in terms of behaviorist principles that focused on the automatic formation of associations between stimuli and responses. One form of associative learning— classical conditioning—is based …
The brain's capacity to remember remains one of the least understood areas of science. What is understood is that memory is a process that occurs constantly and in varying stages. The memory process occurs in three stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Conditions present during each of these stages affect the quality of the memory, and breakdowns at any of these points can cause memory …
The use of modeling in psychotherapy was influenced by the research of social learning theorist Albert Bandura, who studied observational learning in children, particularly in relation to aggression. Bandura pioneered the concept of vicarious conditioning, by which one learns not only from the observed behavior of others but also from whether that behavior is rewarded or punished. Bandura conclude…
Operant conditioning is an elaboration of classical conditioning. Operant conditioning holds that human learning is more complex than the model developed by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and involves human intelligence and will operating (thus its name) on its environment rather than being a slave to stimuli. The Pavlovian model of classical conditioning was revolutionary in its time but eventually came…
Paired-associate (PA) learning was invented by Mary Whiton Calkins in 1894 and involves the pairing of two items (usually words)—a stimulus and a response. For example, words such as calendar (stimulus) and shoe (response) may be paired, and when the learner is prompted with the stimulus, he responds with the appropriate word (shoe). The study of PA learning has been important for a number …
Originally introduced in the mid-1950s by behaviorist B.F. Skinner, programmed instruction is a system whereby the learner uses specially prepared books or equipment to learn without a teacher. It was intended to free teachers from burdensome drills and repetitive problem-solving inherent in teaching basic academic subjects like spelling, arithmetic, and reading. Skinner based his ideas on the pri…
Rehearsal is a term used by memory researchers to refer to mental techniques for helping us remember information. Its technical meaning is not very different from our everyday use of the term. Actors rehearse their lines so that they won't forget them. Similarly, if we want to retain information over time, there are strategies for enhancing future recall. There are two main types of rehears…
Semantic memory allows humans to communicate with language. In semantic memory, the brain stores information about words, what they look like and represent, and how they are used in an organized way. It is unusual for a person to forget the meaning of the word "dictionary," or to be unable to conjure up a visual image of a refrigerator when the word is heard or read. Semantic memory …
In some research on memory for words, the learner is exposed to stimuli to be remembered and later recalls those stimuli in the same order in which they initially appeared. This procedure is called serial learning. In general, when people must recall stimuli in a particular order, they remember less material than when allowed to engage in free recall, which imposes no constraints on the order or r…
When a person attempts to recall a set of stimuli that exceeds about seven items, there is a high likelihood that he or she will forget some of them. The generally accepted limit to memory for material that is not rehearsed is referred to as "the magic number seven" (plus or minus two items). Most studies in this area have employed lists of words or nonsense syllables, but the resear…
Social learning theory has its roots in the behaviorist notion of human behavior as being determined by learning, particularly as shaped by reinforcement in the form of rewards or punishment. Early research in behaviorism conducted by Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B. F. Skinner used animals in a laboratory. Subsequently, researchers became dissatisfied with the capacity of their findings to fully …
Socialization is a lifelong process that begins during infancy in the complex interaction between parent and child. As parents respond to a baby's physical requirements for food and shelter, they are also beginning to teach the baby what to expect from their environment and how to communicate their needs. The action-reaction cycle of smiling, cooing, and touching is a child's earlies…