What Is Learning?

Learning is a relatively lasting change in behavior that is the result of experience. It is the acquisition of
information, knowledge, and skills. When you think of learning, it's easy to focus on formal education
that takes place during childhood and early adulthood. But learning is an ongoing process that takes
place throughout life and isn't confined to the classroom.

Learning became a major focus of study in psychology during the early part of the twentieth century as
behaviorism rose to become a major school of thought. Today learning remains an important concept in
numerous areas of psychology, including cognitive, educational, social, and developmental psychology.

Psychologists study how learning occurs but also how social, emotional, cultural, and biological variables
might influence the learning process.1

Learning Is an Active Process

Even if you learn something relatively quickly, it is still a multi-step process. To learn, you must
encounter new information, pay attention to it, coordinate it with what you already know, store it in
your memory, and apply it.

For example, say you want to fix a running toilet. You might search for a how-to video, watch it to see if
it addresses your need, and then use the instructions to make the repair. Or, consider a time when you
came across an unfamiliar word while reading. If you stopped to look up the meaning, then you learned
a new word.

The term "active learning" is often used to describe an interactive process, such as doing a hands-on
experiment to learn a concept rather than reading about it. But "passive learning" (reading a text,
listening to a lecture, watching a movie) is still learning, and can be effective.

Learning Leads to Lasting Change

Learning means retaining the knowledge that you gained. If you see that new vocabulary word in
another context, you will understand its meaning. If the toilet starts running again in the future, you may
need to watch the video again to refresh your memory on how to fix it, but you have some knowledge of
what to do.

Learning Occurs As a Result of Experience

The learning process begins when you have a new experience, whether that is reading a new word,
listening to someone explain a concept, or trying a new method for solving a problem. Once you've tried
a technique for boiling eggs or a different route to work, you can determine whether it works for you
and then use it in the future.
How Learning Works

The process of learning is not always the same. Learning can happen in a wide variety of ways. To
explain how and when learning occurs, psychologists have proposed a number of different theories.

Learning Through Classical Conditioning

Learning through association is one of the most fundamental ways that people learn new things.3
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov discovered one method of learning during his experiments on the
digestive systems of dogs. He noted that the dogs would naturally salivate at the sight of food, but that
eventually the dogs also began to salivate whenever they spotted the experimenter’s white lab coat.

Later experiments involved pairing the sight of food with the sound of a bell tone. After multiple
pairings, the dogs eventually began to salivate to the sound of the bell alone.

Classical conditioning is a type of learning that takes place through the formation of associations.

An unconditioned stimulus that naturally and automatically triggers a response is paired with an neutral
stimulus. Eventually, an association forms and the previously neutral stimulus becomes known as a
conditioned stimulus that then triggers a conditioned response.

Learning Through Operant Conditioning

The consequences of your actions can also play a role in determining how and what you learn.
Behaviorist B.F. Skinner noted that while classical conditioning could be used to explain some types of
learning, it could not account for everything. Instead, he suggested that reinforcements and
punishments were responsible for some types of learning.

When something immediately follows a behavior, it can either increase or decrease the likelihood that
the behavior will occur again in the future. This process is referred to as operant conditioning.4

For example, imagine that you just got a new puppy, and you would like to begin training it to behave in
specific ways. Whenever the puppy does what you want it to do, you reward it with a small treat or a
gentle pat. When the puppy misbehaves, you scold him and do not offer affection. Eventually, the
reinforcement leads to an increase in the desired behaviors and a decrease in the unwanted behavio.

Punishment and its Effects

A punishment in psychology is a consequence which reduces or aims to reduce the likelihood of a

targeted and undesirable behavior from happening again. Punishment is a part of operant conditioning,
or the use of rewards to encourage certain behaviors and use of negative consequences to discourage
unwanted behaviors. The two types of punishments are positive punishments and negative
punishments. Positive punishments involve the addition of some factor or stimulus to discourage a
behavior, such as criticizing someone in front of a group, adding a rubber band to the arm and snapping
it every time an undesired behavior is demonstrated, doing extra chores, or spanking. During negative
punishments, an appealing stimulus or factor is removed to discourage behavior, such as through the
acts of grounding or losing access to technology or pastime.

Punishments are an immediate solution used to remedy a situation, and they are sometimes viewed as
disadvantageous by psychologists because they do not fully teach behaviors deemed to be appropriate.
Further, punishments often lead to an increase in anger, aggression, and retaliation in children, which
may become more problematic as children grow towards adulthood. For example, damaging the
possessions of a parent each time the child is punished exemplifies how punishment can lead to anger.
Punishments are only effective if the person being punished deems the consequence to be impactful
enough to modify their behavior, so punishments should be strong enough, consistent enough, and
tailored to the wrongly-behaving individual to create the best outcome towards desirable behaviors.

Latent Learning

Latent learning is a form of learning that is not immediately expressed in an overt response. It occurs
without any obvious reinforcement of the behavior or associations that are learned. Latent learning is
not readily apparent to the researcher because it is not shown behaviorally until there is sufficient
motivation. This type of learning broke the constraints of behaviorism, which stated that processes must
be directly observable and that learning was the direct consequence of conditioning to stimuli.

Latent learning also occurs in humans. Children may learn by watching the actions of their parents but
only demonstrate it at a later date, when the learned material is needed. For example, suppose that
Ravi’s dad drives him to school every day. In this way, Ravi learns the route from his house to his school,
but he’s never driven there himself, so he has not had a chance to demonstrate that he’s learned the
way. One morning Ravi’s dad has to leave early for a meeting, so he can’t drive Ravi to school. Instead,
Ravi follows the same route on his bike that his dad would have taken in the car. This demonstrates
latent learning. Ravi had learned the route to school, but had no need to demonstrate this knowledge
earlier.

Observational Learning

According to Albert Bandura, learning can occur by watching others and then modeling what they do or
say. This is known as observational learning. There are specific steps in the process of modeling that
must be followed if learning is to be successful. These steps include

Attention,

Retention

Reproduction

Motivation

Through modeling, Bandura has shown that children learn many things both good and bad simply by
watching their parents, siblings, and others