Learning theories are so central to the discipline of psychology that it is impossible to separate the history of learning theories from the history of psychology. Learning is a basic psychological process, and investigations of the principles and mechanisms of learning have been the subject of research and debate since the establishment of the first psychological laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzeig, Germany, in 1879. Learning is defined as a lasting change in behaviors or beliefs that results from experience. The ability to learn provides every living organism with the ability to adapt to a changing environment. Learning is an inevitable consequence of living–if we could not learn, we would die.
The evolution of learning theories may be thought of as a progression from broad theories developed to explain the many ways that learning occurs to more specific theories that are limited in the types of learning they are designed to explain. Learning theories are broadly separated into two perspectives. The first perspective argues that learning can be studied by the observation and manipulation of stimulus-response associations. This is known as the behaviorist perspective because of its strict adherence to the study of observable behaviors. This perspective was first articulated in 1913 by John Watson, who argued that psychology should be the study of observable phenomena, not the study of consciousness or the mind. Watson believed that objective measurement of observable phenomena was the only way to advance the science of psychology.
The second type of learning theory argues that intervening variables are appropriate and necessary components for understanding the processes of learning. This perspective falls under the broad rubric of cognitive learning theory, and it was first articulated by Wilhem Wundt, the acknowledged "father of psychology," who used introspection as a means of studying thought processes. Although proponents of these two perspectives differ in their view of how learning can be studied, both schools of thought agree that there are three major assumptions of learning theory: (1) behavior is influenced by experience, (2) learning is adaptive for the individual and for the species, and (3) learning is a process governed by natural laws that can be tested and studied.
Behavior Theory
The behaviorist perspective dominated the study of learning throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Behaviorist theories identified processes of learning that could be understood in terms of the relationships between the stimuli that impinge on organisms and the way organisms respond, a view that came to be referred to as S-R theories. A central process in S-R theories is equipotentiality. Equipotential learning means that learning processes are the same for all animals, both human and nonhuman. By studying learning in nonhuman animals, the early behaviorists believed they were identifying the basic processes that are important in human learning. They also believed that learning could only be studied by observing events in the environment and measuring the responses to those events. According to the behaviorists, internal mental states are impossible topics for scientific inquiry, and thus are not necessary in the study of learning. For behaviorists, a change in behavior is the only appropriate indicator that learning has occurred. According to this view, all organisms come into the world with a blank mind, or, more formally, a tabula rasa (blank slate), on which the environment writes the history of learning for that organism. Learning, from the behaviorist perspective, is what happens to an organism as a result of its experiences.
Types of behavioral learning. There are two main types of learning in the behaviorist tradition. The first is classical conditioning, which is associated with the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), a Russian physiologist who studied the digestive processes of dogs. Pavlov noticed that dogs salivated in the absence of food if a particular stimulus was present that had previously been paired with the presentation of food. Pavlov investigated the way in which an association between a neutral stimulus (e.g., a lab technician who fed the dogs), an unconditioned stimulus (food), and an unconditioned reflex (salivation) was made. Pavlov's classic experiment involved the conditioning of salivation to the ringing of a bell and other stimuli that were not likely to make a dog salivate without a previously learned association with food.
In the initial stages of the classical conditioning paradigm, an unconditioned response (UCR; in this case, salivation) is elicited by the presentation of an unconditioned stimulus (UCS; in this case, food). If a neutral stimulus (one that does not elicit the UCR, such as a bell) is paired with the presentation of the UCS over a series of trials, it will come to elicit a conditioned response (CR; also salivation in this example), even when the UCS (food) is absent. In the paradigm of classical conditioning, the previously neutral stimulus (bell) becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS), which produces the conditioned response (CR) of salivation. In other words, the animal in the experiment learns to associate the bell with the opportunity to eat and begins to salivate to the bell in the absence of food. It is as though the animal came to think of the bell as "mouthwatering," although behaviorists never would have used terms like think of, because thinking is not a directly observable behavior.
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