Psychology of Learning Theories

Aristotle

• Associationism

• proposed that memories are formed through associations

• learn through experience 

• make links/associations between things

• associations are formed through 3 principles: contiguity, frequency, similarity

  • contiguity —> experiences near each other in time/space are joined together

    • more likely to associate things when they are presented together

  • frequency —> experiences often repeated & connected more strongly

  • similarity —> experiences similar to one another are connected 

Plato

• Nativism

  • humans shaped primarily by their biological inheritance (nature)

• proposed we are born with innate differences in skill & talent, & suggested sorting by quality soon after birth

• inborn, using logic

Descartes

• Dualism

• mind & body are 2 separate entities each governed by separate laws

• “I think therefore I am” 

• believed most knowledge was innate due to inner working of the machine

• most closely alight with nativist school of thought

• knowledge comes to you through your thinking abilities 

• can’t trust your senses 

Locke

• Empiricism

• knowledge is gained through the senses —> evidence-based, observable

  • you know something is because you experienced it

• proposed that we are born as blank slates (tabula rasa), completely equal & without innate knowledge, and that all out habits and skills are due to experience

• come into the world an empty vessel waiting to be filled up with stuff —> this happens through experience

• mostly closely aligned with associationism

• can’t trust your logic

Behavioral perspective on learning/memory

• behavior cause: external environment

• knowledge is gained empirically

• psychology should study not only observables responses, not unobservable “mental” processes 

Charles Darwin

• Evolution

  • theory that species can change over time, and that all existing species are descendants of common ancestors

  • idea proposed by Erasmus Darwin & others as the study of natural world revealed striking similarities between distinct species of animals

• Natural selection

  • heritable traits that provide reproductive advantages become more common in a population, leading over time to changes in existing species & even the evolution of a new species

  • mechanism of evolution

• behaviors can evolve as well as traits/characteristics

• aligned with nativism

James

• Rule of Mind

• proposed that experiences link ideas in the mind

• remembering one idea would spread along links, retrieving a complex episode

• associationism 

• link together different elements

  • remembering one thing can unlock another memory because they are linked together

• proposed these links would be physically forms in the brain, providing an early link between psychology & neuroscience

Ebbinghaus 

• Founder of experimental psychology 

• interested in how quickly you forget things

• studied memory in an experimental way —> actually doing research 

  • used himself as a test subject

• was first to study memory in a distinctly modern & scientific way

  • empirical — actually collected data

  • experimental — manipulated an independent variable to observe outcome on a dependent variable

  • quantitative — expressed observation numerically

• studied lists of nonsense words (ie. bap, kep, dak)

• simple, effect design

  • learn the list (new memory formed)

  • delay

  • test for memory

  • relearn same list

• dependent variable: savings

  • time to learn list second time/time to learn first time

  • higher savings = good memory

  • 0 savings = list completely forgotten

Pavlov

• Behaviorism

• environment shapes behavior through associations of events with one another

• classical conditioning —> learning based on associations between events (anticipation)

• studied dogs & salivation (especially in relation to food & things associated with food)

  • dogs learned to associate bell with food, leading to salivation only at the sound of the bell

• used classical conditioning to experimental study laws of association

• classical conditioning: learn to associate 2 stimuli or 2 events such that one stimulus elicits a response originally only elicited by the other stimulus

  • involuntary, automatic process (unconscious)

  • enables us to learn to anticipate important events

• learn to anticipate arrival of a very important event

• classical conditioning = experimentally testing associationism

  • contiguity - association between bell & food stronger when both tend to occur together

  • frequency - repeated pairings of bell & food increase strength of association, with characteristic learning curve

  • similarity - salivation responses will generalize to stimuli similar to bell (ie. tone)

Watson

• Behaviorism

• only subject matter in psychology was observable responses/behavior

• didn’t want to study internal thought processes

• radical behaviorist —> no room for thinking about any internal processes

• claimed goal of psychology was to control & predict behavior

• Little Albert study

Thorndike

• behaviorism

• instrumental conditioning —> learn to associate behavior with consequences that follow such that environment shapes behavior through consequences of action

  • what we call operant conditioning today

• Law of Effect = behaviors followed by satisfying consequences become more likely to recur; behaviors followed by unsatisfying consequences become less likely to recur

  • hope can be a reward

Skinner 

• behaviorism

• operant conditioning - learning based on consequences of actions

• developed schedules of reinforcement

• radical behaviorist

• behavior modification - increasing or decreasing a certain behavior 

Hull

• behaviorism

• developed mathematical model of learning

  • explains how much learning would occur on any given trial or in any given situation

• focused on stimulus-response (S-R) learnings

• included concrete variables & move subjective variables (ie. motivation, desirability)

• Drive Reduction hypotheses

Tolman

• Father of cognitive psych

• to understand behavior have to take into account purpose & plan of behavior

• all behavior directed towards a goal (not just reactions to environmental stimuli)

• research showed stimulus to response misses something important 

• rats trained on a maze can find novel ways to the goal (food) when encountering an obstacle 

• since route was novel, could have been no prior association between stimulus (food) & response (novel route)

  • rat wants something (food)

  • rat makes cognitive map (mental layout) of maze

• cognitive map = type of mental representation serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, & decode information about relative locations & attributes of phenomena in everyday or metaphorical spatial environment

• cognition involved in behavior

• rats wanted something —> make cognitive map

• motivated to show what was learned 

Latent learning

• Tolman + Bandura 

• learning not the same as performance

• rats when through one maze trial/day

• one group found food every time (red line)

• second group never found food (blue line)

• third group found food day 11 (green line)

• motivational 

• shows us learning happening previously 

Bandura

• Bobo doll study

• observational learning/modeling

  • A — attention (pay attention to model’s behavior)

  • R — retention (remember model’s behavior)

  • R — reproduction (do what model did)

  • M — motivation (key to understanding latent learning)

• observational learning = learning by watching others

• latent learning displayed behaviorally when you are motivated

Gestalt Psychology 

• cognitive approach

• gestalt = whole 

• whole is more than sum of its parts

• perceptual aspects — continuity, enclosure 

Estes

• cognitive approach

• behaviorist

• mathematical model for cognitive processes

• stimulus-response relationships not so simple

• stimuli are complex

• stimulus sampling theory = over many learning trials most elements of a stimulus would be associated with the response

• need random variation for learning

• thoughts influence our behavior

• ie. do we turn off alarm, go back to sleep, hit snooze

Bower

• cognitive

• mathematical psychologist

• insight = gain understanding, figure it out

• one-step model of learning

  • learning happens in one step & achieve insight

  • once you figure out something out, you got it

• re-interpreted classic “learning curve” of behaviorists

  • looks gradual because average of many individuals

  • in many cases, individual data show dramatic switches from poor to good performance at a single trial

  • realized group data were masking distinctly mental processes of insight

• exemplifies need to go beyond stimulus —> response & think about mental processes

• need cognitive abilities to be able to learn

Miller

• cognitive

• magical number 7 

• tested digit span 

  • read list of letters, short delay, try to recall whole list

• digit span limits represent overload of memory system with capacity of 7 ± 2 items

• digit span assesses short-term memory (related to IQ)

• Miller quantified cognitive processes

• showed there are limits to cognitive abilities

Rumelhart

• cognitive

• believe cognition & cognitive processing was network of connections between simple processing units called nodes

• networks = connectionist models

• information is coded as an activation pattern distributed across many different nodes —> distributed representation