What Is Learning?
Learning is a relatively lasting change in behavior resulting from observation and experience. It is the acquisition of information, knowledge, and problem-solving skills. When you think of learning, it’s easy to focus on formal education that takes place during childhood and early adulthood. However, learning is an ongoing process that takes place throughout life and isn’t confined to the classroom.
Learning became a significant 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, as well as 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.2
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 just as 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.
Learning Can Affect Attitudes, Knowledge, or Behavior
There’s far more to learning than “book learning.” Yes, you can learn new words, concepts, and facts. But you can also learn how to do things and how to feel about things.
It’s important to remember that learning can involve both beneficial and negative behaviors. Learning is a natural and ongoing part of life that takes place continually, both for better and for worse.
Sometimes learning means becoming more knowledgeable and leading a better life. In other instances, it means learning behaviors that are detrimental to health and well-being.
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 a 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 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
