What is Learning?

What is learning? Good question! During the first half of the 20th century, the Behaviouralists began researching the area systematically, but the real breakthroughs came towards the end of the 20th century when Cognitive Science was born.

 

Behaviouralism: primitive theory

Early last century, the behaviouralists defined learning as an observable change in the behaviour of an organism in response to a stimulus in the environment. As you can probably guess, they were studying animals: cats and dogs and rats in mazes. They found that once an animal makes a connection between a behaviour and a reward, it would repeat the behaviour in hopes of the reward.

Providing the trainer occasionally reinforced the behaviour by giving the reward, the animal continued to exhibit the desired behaviour.

They also found that an animal was less likely to repeat behaviour it associated with punishment. And, surprisingly, once an animal had learned a behaviour, the most effective way of extinguishing the behaviour was to ensure it was not reinforced by either reward or punishment.
 
They also discovered that inconsistency - rewarding a behaviour sometimes and punishing it at others, or giving rewards and punishments with no rhyme or reason - reduced the animal to a stressed out basket-case!

The behaviouralist training methods work extremely well on dogs and cats, and to some extent on young humans in a controlled environment. Parents and teachers can use these techniques to stop young children misbehaving.