Learning
Learning occurs when an individual is a new behavior, and that after he expressed is maintained over time (Mazzoni, 2000).
Atkinson, 1953: learning can be defined as any "relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience."
Tulving said: Learning and memory units are not [...]. They are simply large verbal labels that are used to describe a chain of neural components, behavioral, mental [...].
In the history of psychology, learning has meant different things. Within the behaviorist, both Pavlovian classical conditioning, operant conditioning, which Skinner (neocomportamentista), learning is based on the concept of association between a stimulus and a response that becomes a new learned behavior. The association between stimulus and response had to meet two conditions: a temporal contiguity and repetition.
With the advent of Tolman , who serves as a bridge between behaviorism and cognitive psychology is beginning to see the learning even from within and not only from what was observed (as the behaviorists to mind was a black box). With Tolman is called latent learning and internal mental representations.
With Gestalt everything becomes different from the sum of the parts and Kohler shows how humans and animals close to man in the phylogenetic scale, they can learn for insight.
Cognitivism saw many of the experiments that were done only by observing the behavioral observable. In this context the cognitivists showed that it was not the mere presence of the stimulus to give effect to association, but the information that the subject perceived the stimulus.
The man and animals in close phylogenetic scale can also learn concepts for the learning set. As the chimpanzee with two boxes in front, round and square. He knows that one of the food contains. Then learns that if food is in the first box then it will always look beneath that, otherwise it will be the other.
In this regard came in the history of learning Washoe , the chimpanzee who learned to speak and construct sentences with the language for the deaf.
For more complex behaviors can not reduce everything to conditioning even if we look for information related to the reinforcements. Part of human behavior is learned by classical conditioning, operant conditioning to others, but the more complex behaviors are learned by imitation and social observation.
Insights on the topic:
Learning, G. Mazzoni, 2000, Rome, Carocci
Psychology of memory, Brandimonte MA, 2004, Rome, Carocci
Handbook of general psychology, cap.V, P. Legrenzi, 1997, Bologna, Il Mulino
