Name: Nimra Shabir

Roll No: 2943 -BS-PSY-21

Major: Psychology
Subject: Principles of Learning
Course Code: PSY-2102
Instructor’s Name: Ms. Amna Asif
Section: PCA1
Institution: Government College University, Lahore.
 Chapter no 1
Summary
“Background and Rationale for the study of learning and
behaviour”
Learning is the permanent change in the mechanism of behaviours involving
specific stimuli and responses which results from experience. Evidence of learning
is seeing new behaviour or responses or suppressing old responses. All actions of
an organism at a particular time is performance. Performance can be related to
learning but is not same as learning. Persistent behavioural change without
environmental event is not learning e.g. maturation. The philosophical definition of
learning is to accumulate knowledge. Knowledge is internally stored information
about the world and about how things work.
There was a belief before Descartes that behaviour is determined by free will and
conscious intent. Rene Descartes started the theoretical approach to learning and
noticed that people do many things automatically in response to external stimuli
and formulated the dualistic view of behavior known as Cartesian Dualism.
According to Cartesian dualism there are two classes of human behaviour
voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary actions consists of the behavior which a
person exhibits on his own will and is under conscious control while involuntary
actions consists of the behaviour which a person exhibits automatically through a
special process called Reflex. Traditions stemmed from dualism are mentalism and
reflexology.
Mentalism concerns with the working and content of the mind and Reflexology
concerns with the mechanisms of reflexive behavior. The philosophical approach
that assumes we are born with innate ideas about certain things is called nativism.
According to this mind is the source of voluntary behavior and abilities are
hardwired and mind come predisposed to certain abilities and knowledge. John
Locke who disagreed with Descartes’ nativism and his ideas were empiricist that
all knowledge is acquired directly or indirectly after birth and humans have no
preconceptions and all knowledge is built up from sensory experience that is
empiricism. Sensations are combined to form complex ideas by associations.
Associations create more complex ideas by sensation. There are two types of rules
of association i-e primary and secondary. Primary rules are contiguity, similarity
and contrast. Secondary tells that association between two stimuli depends on
frequency and intensity.
Thomas Hobbes believed that mind was governed by seeking pleasure and
avoiding pain, this is called Hedonism. Ivan Pavlov discovered that not all
reflexes are innate but new reflexes establish through association. B. F Skinner
proposed that animal behavior gives us insight to human behavior. He used models
based on rats, pigeons and primates.
Comparative Cognition and the Evolution of intelligence:
In claiming continuity from nonhuman to human animals, Darwin sought to
characterize not only the evolution of physical traits but also the evolution of
psychological or mental abilities. He argued that the human mind is a product of
evolution. In making this claim, Darwin did not deny that human beings had
mental abilities such as the capacity for wonder, curiosity, imitation, attention,
memory, reasoning, and aesthetic sensibility. Rather, he suggested that nonhuman
animals also had these abilities. For example, he maintained that nonhuman
animals were capable even of belief in spiritual agencies.
Functional Neurology:
The modern era in the study of learning processes was also greatly stimulated by
efforts to use studies of learning in nonhuman animals to gain insights into how the
nervous system works. All key physiological functions are governed by the
nervous system.
Animal models of human behavior:
The idea that research with nonhuman animals can yield data that might help us
better understand human behaviour was the third main driver for the modern
period in the study of animal learning. Animal simulations of human behaviour are
more useful than rather than functional neurology or comparative cognition, recent
origin. Animal models are used for developing drugs especially those enhancing
learning and cognition, anxiety search for potential drug abuse with new drugs to
understand reinforcement learning in robotics. Animal models are used because
they are simpler, easily controlled and less expensive. The validity of the model is
given when the functions of the real object are identified and relation between
animal findings and human behavior must be carefully verified by empirical data.