· What is learning?

Birds build nests and migrate as winter approaches. Infants suckle at their mother's breast. Dogs shake water off wet fur and salmon swim upstream to spawn, while spiders spin intricate webs.

What do these seemingly unrelated behaviors have in common? They're all are unlearned behaviors.

Both instincts and reflexes are innate behaviors that organisms are born with. Reflexes are a motor or neural reaction to a specific stimulus in the environment. They tend to be simpler than instincts, involving the activity of specific body parts and systems, and involve more primitive centres of the central nervous system.

In contrast, instincts are innate behaviors that are triggered by a broader range of events, such as aging and the change of seasons. They are more complex patterns of behavior, involving movement of the organism as a whole, and involving higher brain centres.

Both reflexes and instincts help an organism adapt to its environment and do not have to be learned. For example, every healthy human baby has a sucking reflex, present at birth. Babies are born knowing how to suck on a nipple, whether artificial (from a bottle) or human.

Nobody teaches the baby to suck, just as no one teaches a sea turtle hatchling to move toward the ocean.

Learning, like reflexes and instincts, allows an organism to adapt to its environment, but unlike instincts and reflexes, learned behaviors involve change and experience.

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge that results from experience, and in contrast to innate behaviors, it involves acquiring knowledge and skills through experience which is a complex interaction of conscious and unconscious processes.

The field of behavioural psychology focuses largely on measurable behaviours that are learned, rather than trying to understand internal states such as emotions and attitudes.

Learning has traditionally been studied in terms of the simplest components—the associations our minds automatically make between events. Our minds have a natural tendency to connect events that occur closely together or in sequence.

Associative learning occurs when an organism makes connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment. Associative learning is central to all three basic learning processes of classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning.

Classical conditioning is a process where we learn to associate events, or stimuli, that frequently happen together. As a result of this, we learn to anticipate events.

Ivan Pavlov conducted a famous study involving dogs in which he trained (or conditioned) the dogs to associate the sound of a bell with the presence of a piece of meat. The conditioning is achieved when the sound of the bell on its own makes the dog salivate in anticipation for their meal.

Operant conditioning is the learning process by which behaviours are reinforced or punished, thus strengthening or weakening a response. Edward Thorndike coined the term 'Law of effect', in which behaviours that are followed by consequences that are satisfying to the organism are more likely to be repeated, and behaviours that are followed by unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.

B. F. Skinner researched operant conditioning by conducting experiments with rats in what he called a 'Skinner box'. Over time, the rats learned that pressing a lever caused the release of food, demonstrating that behaviour can be influenced by rewards or punishments. He differentiated between positive and negative reinforcement, and also explored the concept of extinction.

Observational learning occurs through observing the behaviours of others and imitating those behaviours—even if there is no reinforcement at the time. Albert Bandura noticed that children often learn through imitating adults, and he tested his theory using his famous Bobo- doll experiment.

Through this experiment, Bandura learned that children would attack the Bobo doll after viewing adults hitting the doll.