Learning Is The Process Of Acquiring Knowledge And Skills Through Personal Experience

Learning is the process of acquiring knowledge and skills through personal experience. It results in a relatively permanent change in behavior which psychology can explain in different ways by a variety of different approaches. For example, the cognitive approach argues that mental processes shape an individual’s behaviour, whereas the behavioural approach proposes that behaviour is simply nothing more than a product of past experience and personal circumstances. Through the continuous process of learning we end up perceiving our environment differently, leading to a change in the way we interpret incoming stimuli, and hence therefore determines the way we interact and behave (Heffner, 2016).

There are two simple forms of learning. One form is habituation which diminishes an elicited response to a stimulus after repeated exposure. It is regarded as stimulus specific because the more you become familiar to a particular stimulus, the less likely you are to pay attention to it and therefore respond to it. However, as soon as a new stimulus is introduced, the previous habituated response will appear to quickly recover (Domjan, 2010). This learning process can be of two types; short term habituation which describes a temporary, immediate decline in response and long term habituation which accounts for more permanent and slower decline in response. The other simple form of learning is known as sensitisation which is a non-associative learning process and results in an increase in responsivity to an intense stimulus after repeated exposure. Habituation and sensitisation both result from repeated stimulation and therefore appear to compete with one another for control over behaviour (Domjan, 2010). What form of learning you experience wi...

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...asic procedures of classical conditioning in that we go from an unconditioned stimuli (US) eliciting an unconditioned response (UR), to a conditioned stimuli (CS) eliciting a conditioned response (CR), of which is all achieved by associating a neutral stimulus (NS) with an unconditioned stimulus.

The current research sought to investigate this concept further with a partial replication of the study conducted by Pavlov (1902). The purpose of the study was to primarily investigate whether the same concept of classical conditioning in animals can be applied to humans. It may have been the case that this type of learning process only occurs in non-human organisms and so therefore further study was needed to clarify the conditions. Our main hypothesis was that classical conditioning would still appear to occur in humans and would hence lead to an increase in salivation.