Theoretical explanations of the learning process have concerned experimental psychologists for well over 100 years and have been a dominant theme in psychology. Researchers suppose that people possess instinctual motives, but the important factors of our behavior are learned. Drives of behavior typically motivate us; our actions in response to these motives are also learned through our interaction with the environment and the world around us.
Thesis: Experience is the main driven force in learning and knowledge acquisition processes.
Following behaviorism, motivation to attend school is a learned one, and that behaviors, while children are attending school, are also learned. One main goal of the behaviorist is the definition of the laws governing learning–a concern that has dominated psychology for a long period of time. For much of this century, behaviorists have proposed general explanations of learning, that is, a single view that could explain the learning of all behaviors.
Following Smilkstein (2003), learning is defined as a change in the probability of exhibiting a specific behavior. This change in behavior occurs as the result of experience, either successful or unsuccessful. Hull suggested that through classical conditioning, environmental events can acquire the ability to produce internal drive (Hall and Channell 1980). According to this view, the association of environmental cues with the antecedent conditions which produce an unconditioned drive state causes the development of a conditioned drive state (Bolles 1972).
Once this conditioned drive state has developed, these cues can induce internal arousal and thus can motivate behavior on subsequent occasions, even in the absence of the unconditioned drive-inducing stimuli. The question is: What determines which behavior is elicited when an animal is aroused?
In Hull’s view, drive motivates behavior, but each specific action depends on the environment–or environmental events direct behavior. Researchers question: which behavior does a specific stimulus elicit? Hull thought that when an animal or human is motivated, the environmental cue automatically elicits a response; the response with the strongest innate habit strength to that stimulus will occur (Hall and Channell 1980). If that response reduces the drive state, the bond between the stimulus and response is strengthened; thus, in Hull’s view, habit strength is increased as the result of drive reduction (Illeris, 2003).
“Conditioned inhibition” is specific to a particular response and acts to reduce the excitatory strength of the main habit. The continued failure of behavior to reduce drive causes the second response in the habit hierarchy to become the main habit. If this second behavior is successful (produces drive reduction), the response’s habit strength increases, and the response will again be elicited when the animal is motivated. The conditioned inhibition process will be repeated if the second habit in the hierarchy is also ineffective; thus, the animal will continue down the habit hierarchy until a successful response is discovered (Bolles 1972).
Behavior is not only goal-oriented but specific outcomes are expected to follow specific behaviors. For example, you expect that going to a favorite restaurant will result in a great meal. If you do not obtain this goal, you will continue to search for the reward and will not be satisfied with a lesser valued goal object. Thus, if the favorite restaurant is closed, you will not accept any restaurant but instead, choose a suitable alternative. Also, certain events in the environment convey information about where goals are located. People are able to reach goals only after learning the environmental signs leading to rewards or punishment (Groves and Thompson 1999).
People are not only motivated to obtain the reward but also to expect a specific reinforcer. An individual will not accept a lesser valued reward when expecting to receive a desired one and will continue to act until the desired reward is obtained (Seligman 1970).
The behaviorist theories attempt to detail how the individual events that occur in a conditioning situation are combined or integrated by the subject so as to produce emergent sensitivity to relative validity. Learners must get involved with whatever topic or problem they select and must learn its characteristics as well as the general skills of problem-solving (Nurran and Lamb, 1999). In short, we learn by doing. All the interesting aspects of conditioning take place at the level of learning (Randich and LoLordo
1979). Researchers suppose that learning is linked with a performance by a rule that maintains stable behavior patterns so that larger values should correspond to more dynamic or more probable responses. The specific rule might depend on the experimental situation, and in fact, might be different for different stimuli within the same situation. For all intents and purposes, performance is considered a rather direct window on associative value (Matzel et al. 1985).
Contiguity theory is centrally concerned with the number of pairings of the conditioned stimulus (CS) with the unconditioned stimulus (US). In its simplest form, it does not attach any importance to presentations of the CS or US alone. It was recognized that presentations of the CS alone intermixed with the CS-US pairings of training (i.e., partial reinforcement) were detrimental to conditioned responding, presumably because the extinction of the CS occurred on those trials lacking the US.
The pervasiveness of the phenomenon of extinction resulted in the concept of contiguity being modified to emphasize the percentage of recent CS presentations that were reinforced, as opposed to merely the total number of reinforced pairings. However, just as presentations of the CS alone during training attenuate conditioned responding, so too do presentations of the US alone (Marlin 1982). To address these inadequacies of contiguity theory, Contingency theory takes into account not only the presence and absence of the US on trials in which the CS is present but also the presence and absence of the US on trials in which the CS is omitted.
A failing of contingency theory is its inability to cope with various manipulations of temporal duration (Hall and Pearce 1979). This is evident in the rather arbitrary assumption that, during conditioning sessions, intervals lacking the CS are decomposed by the subject into epochs of duration equal to the CS duration. Although it may seem farfetched to assume that an animal would process information in this manner, in practice, this assumption has been rather successful (Randich and LoLordo 1982).
The reason for this success is that the successful transformation of differences into behavior requires multiplication by a constant (Smilkstein, 2003). This transformation corrects for the error in presuming that the CS duration is the basic unit of time for the psychological process (i.e., the psychological moment), provided that the psychophysical function for time perception is linear. Nevertheless, an accurate description of the data is not necessarily indicative of an accurate description of the underlying mechanism.
More serious is the inability of contingency theory to deal with variable CS durations and with no-CS intervals that are not integer multiples of the CS duration. Simple contiguity theory has had to be qualified in order to account for phenomena such as the effects of unpaired CSs and USs, variable intertrial intervals, simultaneous and backward pairings, and higher-order conditioning. Nevertheless, the need for temporal and spatial proximity to form associations is so compelling that no serious model of learning fails to incorporate the principles of contiguity in some form (Hall and Channell 1980).
The failings of each of these models make evident that none of them embody completely valid principles. Yet, each model has addressed with considerable success some existing deficits of the other models and has inspired research that has resulted in important empirical observations. Given the failings of these models, there are three strategies available to researchers. Such modifications usually take the form of qualifiers or additional postulates. These can be thought of as placing bandaids on a model (Randich and LoLordo 1979). A good model is one that is easier to remember than the data that it explains. Third, the models can be abandoned.
This strategy is constructive only when another model is available as an alternative. In a theoretical field, there is no basis for doing one experiment instead of another (Bolles 1972). Inquiry skills appear to help learners make decisions, understand the nature of science, become acquainted with the work of scientists, and develop logical thinking. The cooperative methods also contribute to positive social relations, which in turn enlarge the friendship circle among the heterogeneous population of students. The cooperative approach enables people to see common goals as their objectives in the learning process.
In sum, the learning process can be explained by behaviorist theories. Thus they fail to explain a person’s ability to store information and acquire scientific knowledge.
Contiguity theory helps to explain the process of knowledge acquisition and view any behavior under consideration as starting with a measurable stimulus and ending with a measurable response, independent of whether the behavior is overt (as in running or talking) or covert (as in imagining or feeling).
References
Groves P. M., & Thompson R. F. (1999). Habituation: A dual-process theory. Psychological Review, 77, 419-450.
Bolles R. C. (1972). “Reinforcement, expectancy and learning”. Psychology Review, 79, 394-409.
Groves P. M., & Thompson R. F. (1999). Habituation: A dual-process theory. Psychological Review, 77, 419-450.
Illeris, K. (2003). The Three Dimensions of Learning: Contemporary Learning Theory in the Tension Field Between the Cognitive, the Emptional and the Social. National Institute of Adult Continuing Education.
Nurran, D. Lamb, C. (1999). The Self-Directed Teacher: Managing the Learning Process. Cambridge University Press; 1 edition.
Hall G., & Channell S. (1980). A search for perceptual differentiation produced by nondifferential reinforcement. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32, 185-196.
Hall G., & Pearce J. M. (1979). Latent inhibition of a CS during CS-US pairings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 5, 31-42.
Marlin N. A. (1982). “Within-compound associations between the context and the conditioned stimulus”. Learning and Motivation, 13,526-541.
Matzel L. D., Schachtman T. R., & Miller R. R. (1985). “Recovery of an overshadowed association achieved by extinction of the overshadowing stimulus”. Learning and Motivation, 16,398-412.
Randich A., & LoLordo V. M. (1979). “Associative and non-associative theories of the UCS preexposure phenomenon: Implications for Pavlovian conditioning”. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 523-548.
Seligman M. E. P. (1970). “On the generality of laws of learning”. Psychological Review, 44, 406-418.
Smilkstein, R. (2003). We’re Born to Learn: Using the Brain’s Natural Learning Process to Create Today’s Curriculum. Corwin Press.