INTRODUCTION TO LEARNING THEORY

This resource introduces Psychology students to some of the concepts of learning theory.
Start by reading the following article.

The following is an article by Bob Boakes, McCaughey Professor of Psychology and

current Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, UK and at
Harvard University, USA. His main research interests at present concern nausea-based
conditioning in both rats and in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, as well as the
history of psychology.

Now that you have read the article you will be familiar with the terms used by
Psychologists when discussing theories of learning. Continue now and read more about
learning by insight.

LEARNING THEORY by Bob Boakes:

Learning is the process by which we gain knowledge about the world. It is not just something we
try to switch on occasionally when, for example, we have an exam to study for or want to try a
new game. It is a process that starts before we are born and continues to the moment we die. The
kind of concentrated, deliberate process that we usually refer to as „learning‟ in a school context
is only one of the ways we acquire knowledge. Most of what most people learn about their
worlds is absorbed in other ways, usually without conscious intention. Learning theory is the
study of the basic principles by which any kind of learning occurs.
From the viewpoint of evolution, species survive only if they are adapted to their environment.
Early in the development of his theory, Charles Darwin concluded that the behaviour of animals
is one of the most important factors for survival. At one extreme behaviour can be entirely
innate, selected to be highly effective in a particular ecological niche, but totally inflexible in the
face of change. At the other extreme are species like our own where all of what we do, how we
react emotionally as well as in our actions is learning and can change if conditions change.

From its beginnings over a hundred years ago, learning theory has developed within an
evolutionary context. It seeks fundamental principles underlying the way that species, in general,
adapt to their particular environments as the first step towards a proper understanding of human
learning. It is for this reason that rats and pigeons in particular have loomed so large in learning
research. Physiologists have for centuries studied the functions of organs such as the heart or
lungs in various mammals to the enormous benefit of human medicine. More recently, genetic
research, starting with fruit flies, has made possible the current massive international project on
the human genome. But when it comes to the mind, many people feel great reluctance to accept
that we might learn much from the laboratory rat. Surely we learn about our worlds in a very
different way from any other animal? Possibly we do. Clearly our unique possession of a
language which enables us to register and think about our experience transforms some of the
ways we learn. Nonetheless, the facts of evolution strongly suggest that much of what we know
that is not easily put into words and those reactions that we label involuntary are based on
processes shared with other species.

Since learning begins before birth and our experiences vary enormously from one individual to
the next, even for people growing up within the same culture, or even in the same family, not
only does what we have learned throughout our lives differ, but how we learn from some new
experience also differs. One advantage of studying animals is that, if raised in a laboratory, their
prior experience can be made much more uniform. For example, we shall see later that whether
or not an individual has encountered a particular taste before can have a major influence on
whether it is associated with an experience of sickness. It is a simple matter to ensure that a
group of rats has never tasted anything sweet before they enter an experiment that studies the
development of, say, a learned aversion to sugar water. It is unlikely that anyone will ever carry
out such an experiment with people.

How did learning theory begin?

Through the ages people have speculated about the nature of learning and developed sound
practical advice on the subject. However, the scientific study of learning did not begin until late
in the nineteenth century. Two developments most directly influenced later research. By
coincidence they happened almost simultaneously on opposite sides of the world. In St.
Petersburg, the first Russian scientist to win a Nobel Prize switched his attention from the
digestive system to the brain, but continued to use the same subjects, dogs, and the same kind of
response, glandular secretions (particularly saliva). For the first thirty or so years of this century
Ivan Pavlov carried out a series of experiments which were barely interrupted, even by the
Bolshevik revolution. He discovered most of the basic properties of what he called „conditioned
reflexes‟, but which we term now respondent, classical or, most commonly, Pavlovian
conditioning (Boakes, 1984).

In the mid 1890s, unknown to Pavlov, a young American graduate student, Edward Thorndike,
laid the groundwork for the study of a second kind of learning process, now referred to
as operant, or, more generally, as instrumental conditioning. Thorndike was interested in the
intelligence of animals. He ran experiments to test whether a cat could show insight in solving
problems, or could use only a process of trial and error with accidental success when, for
example, learning to operate a latch in order to get out of a clumsily modified packing case
Thorndike grandly called a „puzzle box‟. He failed to find evidence for insight, but did make
some important discoveries about the development of habits. He was particularly interested in
the way in which the immediate consequences, or effect, of an action modify its subsequent
frequency. His can be seen as the first systematic study of the principle that we tend to repeat
actions that have pleasing outcomes. Since his day the precise version of what might be seen as
an obvious rule of thumb from everyday psychology has been known as the law of effect
(Boakes, 1984).

Thorndike had many successors within American psychology who continued his original work
on conditioning. This research increasingly involved the testing of rats in mazes, as the
cartoonists quickly noticed and have never forgotten. An early pioneer in this field was John
Watson, who became famous as the founder of a movement known as Behaviourism. He
believed that Pavlov‟s conditioned reflex provided the building block for a new science of
psychology that was built on observable behaviour alone, and rejected introspection or reference
to mental events (Boakes, 1984). More recently, the most influential Behaviourist writer has
been B.F. Skinner whose early scientific career was based on studies of conditioning, first in the
rat and then the pigeon (Skinner, 1953).

Watson and Skinner were eager that the results from experiments on animal behaviour should
yield direct practical benefits. He and his successors developed treatments for various kinds of
psychological disorder, such as irrational fears, as well as innovations in education and skills
training. Such treatments are known as behaviour therapy or, more generally, as behaviour
modification.

How do we know what an animal has learned?

When we see a lightning flash we come to expect the sound of thunder; when we hear a certain
raucous screech we might expect to see a cockatoo; the smell of burning might evoke thoughts of
smoke; the clatter of plates and cutlery might prompt the idea that a meal is ready. These are just
some of the thousands of associations we learn throughout our lifetime. Pavlov‟s great insight
was to realise that it was possible to carry out experiments to discover how such arbitrary
associations between individual sensory events are learned. He found that he could take any
stimulus, something as unrelated to feeding, for example, as a slight pressure to a dog‟s hind leg,
and, as a result of pairing it with food a few times, train a dog to associate the two events. How
do we know that it has learned anything? By measuring how much salivation is produced when
the hindleg is touched.

In such a Pavlovian experiment the dog has no more control over the two events than we have
over thunder and lightning. It just learns that in this new artificial world of the laboratory, these
two stimuli go together. By contrast, Thorndike‟s cats (or their successors, the multitude of rats
that have sat in front of a lever which, when pressed, will deliver food) were in control of their
world. This is termed instrumental conditioning. Unlike in Pavlovian conditioning, the
occurrence of some important event, the reinforcement, is dependent on what the animal does.
What an individual generally learns after exposure to a Pavlovian procedure is that two external
events are related, whereas after being exposed to an instrumental procedure what is learned is
that a certain action is followed by a certain outcome. What both procedures have in common is
that they provide objective measures by which we can assess what has been learned.

What is the difference between extinction and forgetting?

The two kinds of conditioning are distinct, but have much in common. For one thing, they are
both subject to extinction: if reinforcement is no longer dependent on the critical stimulus or
action, then the effects produced by conditioning will disappear (Mazur, 1990). This property is
often ignored in fictional accounts of human conditioning, as in the film Clockwork Orange. If
hearing a screech is no longer ever followed by the sight of a cockatoo, we give up expecting to
see one. When Pavlov continued to touch the hind legs of his dogs, but no longer gave them food
afterwards, they stopped producing saliva. The same happens with instrumental conditioning
(Mazur, 1990). A dolphin that has for years leaped high over a cross bar in a daily performance
will soon stop doing so if she is no longer given some fish following the response. Intriguingly it
turns out that extinction is much slower, particularly for instrumental conditioning, if
reinforcement has previously been given only intermittently. Thus, a dolphin with a mean trainer
who has given her fish after only half her leaps will persist in leaping many more times when the
fish runs out than one with a more generous trainer. This has been named the
partial reinforcement extinction effect (Hulse, Egeth, & Deese, 1980).

Extinction is not the same as forgetting. The latter refers to the weakening of a response, or
difficulty in retrieving information, as a result of the passage of time. Forgetting the name of
someone we have not seen for a long time, or a once familiar phone number, are common
examples. Although very sensitive to extinction resulting from withholding of reinforcement, the
effects of conditioning are, in general not easily forgotten. In one experiment, pigeons were
given a few pairings of a sound with electric shock and then not tested with the sound until over
two years later. They still showed a strong fear reaction. By contrast, just a few presentations of
the sound unaccompanied by shock would extinguish the reaction. The same resistance to
forgetting is shown by instrumental conditioning. This is more similar to the retention of a skill
such as swimming or riding a bike, where we can go for many years without performing the skill
and yet not lose it.

What general properties are shown by conditioning?

One of the ways in which Thorndike‟s Law of Effect is more precise than the everyday principle,
that we tend to repeat actions that had pleasing consequences, is that it pinpoints the importance
of time. A rat is a conditioning chamber that presses a lever for the first time but does not get a
pellet until 20 seconds later will learn very slowly. If reinforcement is immediate then learning is
rapid. This was a principle that Thorndike introduced into educational psychology (Hilgard &
Bower, 1966). Learning in a classroom is much more effective where immediate feedback is
provided.

The temporal relationship between events in equally important for Pavlovian conditioning. A
bell that is consistently followed by food only after a delay of, say, even just a couple of minutes,
will not come to elicit much saliva. On the other hand, Pavlovian conditioning involving aversive
events is more tolerant of delay (Mackintosh 1974). A particular piece of music might make
someone feel extremely anxious if previously they had listened to it on the car radio some
minutes before a bad crash.

Another basic property of both kinds of conditioning is generalisation. To continue the previous
example, after the crash any music by the same band might prove disturbing. In experiments we
can study how generalisation is related to the similarity between some test stimulus and the
original event. Such generalisation gradients can be obtained for instrumental conditioning too.
In a recent study, three horses learned to press a panel for food only when a vibrator attached to a
certain place on their back was switched on. Food was otherwise unavailable. Thus, the vibrator
became a discriminative stimulus for responding. Once they had learned this discrimination, the
vibrator was put in various positions along the animals‟ backs. The rate at which they pressed the
panel was found to decrease systematically with the distance between the test position and the
position used during training. Under more usual circumstances, a horse is trained, say, to move
forwards when touched in a certain place, but clearly it would be poor to ride if it responded only
when the precise spot was touched.

The physical characteristics of an event are important in determining how much is learned about
it. In conditioning experiments, loud or bright stimuli are associated with some reinforcing event
much more rapidly than quiet or dim ones. Also very important is whether the event is novel or
familiar. If, to return to our example, the song before the crash was one that the passenger had
heard a hundred times before, it would be far less likely to evoke an anxiety reaction afterwards
than if it had been new (Mackintosh, 1974; Schwartz, 1989).

Is all learning based on simple conditioning?

There are many forms of learning that are not easily classified as either classical (Pavlovian) or
instrumental conditioning. Food aversions provide a controversial example. Most people can
remember at least one occasion on which they ate some unusual food and later were ill, with the
result that they found themselves unable to eat that food ever again. Interestingly this can happen
when the person knows full well that the food had nothing to do with the illness. Even if the
illness must have been due to a stomach infection picked up from someone else, an irrational
disgust reaction can develop to the associated, but blameless, food (Logue 1986). In the
laboratory, this kind of learning has been shown to share several properties with more
conventional types of Pavlovian conditioning. It is, for example, highly sensitive to latent
inhibition; that is, an aversion develops much more readily to a novel than to a familiar food. On
the other hand, it has some very unusual properties. For example, it can develop despite a delay
of several hours between the food and the illness. No other learning shows anything like this.
Also, it is a very selective type of learning, in that aversions are readily formed to a particular
taste, but less easily to a smell (Mazur, 1990).

Imprinting is another form of learning studied in animals and also has unusual properties. This
refers to the formation of social attachments that can be dramatically fast in some species of
birds and occur only when the individual is still very young. The same is true of the way some
birds acquire their species song. Since there appears to be a sensitive phase for the learning of
their first language by children, some interesting analogies between birdsong and human
language learning have been suggested.

A bird acquiring its species song or a baby starting to talk are examples of social learning, where
what is learned comes from an individual‟s social environment. Compared with other species,
human beings are remarkable both for possession of a language and for the enormous part played
by social learning in our lives. For example, as Thorndike was one of the first to discover, most
other mammals have only a very limited ability to learn by imitation, a process that becomes of
central importance quite early in human childhood.

How is learning theory put into practice?

Following the earlier suggestions of the Behaviourists, learning theory has proven particularly
useful in the treatment of self-destructive habits and of crippling fears. Many of these treatments
involve what is called exposure therapy, which is essentially the use of extinction procedures.
Take someone who is abnormally shy and finds speaking or being the centre of attention in a
group of relative strangers a traumatising experience. It is often very difficult to understand how
such a social phobia, or any other kind of specific phobia, towards spiders, for example, has
developed. However, this does not prevent rapid and effective treatment based on encouraging
the person to confront the situation a number of time. This often starts with something that is
only mildly frightening and then progresses towards the previously most feared situation.
Untreated, many such fears, even ones that have a disastrous effect on people‟s lives, may persist
for a lifetime. They do so because we are very prone to avoid the experiences that would allow
them to extinguish. Avoidance learning is a phenomenon that has been analysed in great detail in
the learning laboratory (Mazur, 1990; Schwartz, 1989).

The treatment of phobias has leaned heavily on research into pavlovian conditioning. The
principles of instrumental conditioning, particularly those concerned with the maintenance of a
repetitive response by intermittent reinforcement, have been especially useful when people have
become locked into habits that are harmful to them, and often to others. The interactions between
parents and children in a family setting can take this form. A family therapist may look at the
dynamics of violence in terms of the events that trigger particular reactions and the consequences
that ensure that they will be repeated. The suggestions for change will not be phrased in learning
theory terms, but will nonetheless use the concepts that have come out of the study of
instrumental conditioning.

These examples are not intended to suggest that applications of learning theory are limited to
clinical psychology. Similar principles have contributed to the development of stress
management techniques people can use to cope better with the harder parts of everyday life, and
also with exceptionally stressful experiences, such as when undergoing some kinds of medical
treatment (Logue, 1986).

In contrast, extinction of some fears may be harmful. Crossing or driving along a busy road
without having an accident is a very common experience. Sometimes it can lead us to get used to
crossing a road with shorter gaps between cars or driving at higher speeds. For thousands of
Australians each year the consequence of such extinction of reasonable fear has serious, and
sometimes fatal, consequences. Understanding how a specific relationship between a particular
response and its consequence can affect human behaviour is of key importance to a traffic
engineer who has to decide on the timing of pedestrian signs at a road intersection. Next time
you are waiting to cross a main road, watch the people waiting with you, observe who presses
the button and how often. Reflect on whether people‟s behaviour in such situations is the same as
that of a rat in Skinner box ... but don‟t keep thinking about this when you come to cross the
road.
Further reading
There are many good introductory books on psychology, primarily intended to use in 1st year
university courses, which contain chapters titled “Learning”. These provide additional detail on
the topics covered here. Psychology by Gleitman (New York; Norton) is particularly good in
this respect. Many of the others are very satisfactory, including the only introductory text with
an Australian flavour, Psychology: An introduction by Summers, Borland, and Walker (Brisbane:
John Wiley). If you want to get deeper into a particular topic, try a textbook with Learning in the
title. Some of the older ones are very dry, but you should find the Psychology of Learning and
Behaviour by Schwartz (New York: Norton) quite readable, if you skip the very technical
passages. Those interested in the history of the subject could consult my own book, From
Darwin to Behaviourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

References
- Boakes, R A (1984) From Darwin to Behaviourism: Psychology and the minds of
animals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Hilgard, E.R. & Bower, G.H., (1966). Theories of learning (pp 15-47) New York: Appleton
Century Crofts
- Hulse, S H Egeth, H & Deese J (1980) The psychology of learning (5th ed.). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
- Logue, A W (1986) The psychology of eating and drinking New York: W H Freeman
- Mackintosh, N. J., (1974) The psychology of animal learning. London: Academic Press.
- Mazur, J E (1990) Learning and behaviour (2nd ed.) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- Schwartz, B (1989) Psychology of learning and behaviour (3rd ed.) New York: Norton
- Skinner, B.J. (1953) Science and human behaviour. New York: Macmillan.