getting lost, or say who he was, where he lived, or why he had gone out. Like HM, he was stuck in a single moment, with a poor sense of past and future.The ability to learn and remember is indeed crucial. Almost every aspect of our thinking and behavior depends heavily on learning, and learning is central to our daily functioning. Humans continually need to gather and store information about the world to behave adaptively, to bring past experience to bear. So, the study of this capability is at center stage in psychology and is very important in such disciplines as artificial intelli- gence (AI), philosophy, biology, education, and linguistics.
THE CONCEPT OF LEARNING AND THE CONCEPT OF MEMORY
Everyone knows what learning is, but most would behard-pressed to define it. There are several definitions, but none is universally accepted. Here are some oft-used ones.
1.
"A relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of practice." The change must be relatively permanent (e.g., not due to transient reactions to stimuli, such as a startle response) and must be due to practice rather than fatigue, drugs, injury, and so on. This definition is favored by behaviorists (described later) and is still commonly cited in introductory psychology text- books.
2.
"Organized knowledge which grows and becomes better organized" ( Charniak and McDermott, 1985, 610).
3.
"Any process whereby people or machines increase their knowledge or their skill" ( Stillings et. al., 1987, 189).
4.
"An experience-dependent lasting modification in such representations" ( Dudai, 1989, 6). (A representation is information in the nervous system that stands for something in the world.) This definition is favored in neuroscience.
5.
"The acquisition of knowledge and/or skills." Knowledge in this sense is factual information--e.g., that Paris is the capital of France and that 1+1=2--and skills are co-ordinations of perception and action, such as the skills of typing and car driving.
The definitions have some commonalities. Learning is seen as a lasting change of some sort, and in four definitions involves acquiring information. Dudai ( 1989) looks at a variety of definitions of learning and notes some other commonalities: learning occurs after individual experience (rather than being the kind of information acquisition of a species over many generations that is coded in the genes) and is a process rather than an instantaneous change. Some definitions hold that learning improves the organism, but it is easy to think of cases of learning that do not. For instance,
-2-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication Information: Book Title: Learning and Memory: Major Ideas, Principles, Issues and Applications. Contributors: Robert W. Howard - author. Publisher: Praeger. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 2.
Add a Shared Note
Shared Notes are comments made by Questia users on books,
book pages, or articles that inform other users and enhance
the Questia research community.
This feature allows you to create and manage separate folders for your different research projects. To view markups for a different project, make that project your current project.
This feature allows you to save a link to the publication you are reading or view all the publications you have put on your bookshelf.
This feature allows you to save a link to the page you are reading, which you can later return to from Projects.
This feature allows you to highlight words or phrases on the publication page you are reading.
This feature allows you to save a note you write on the publication page you are reading.
This feature allows you to create a citation to the page you are reading that you can paste into your paper. Highlight a passage to include that passage as a quotation.
This feature allows you to save a reference to a publication you are reading for your bibliography or generate a bibliography you can paste into your paper.
This feature allows you to print the page you are reading,
including your notes or highlights (IE users must have "print background colors and image" setting selected.)
This feature allows you to look up words in encyclopedia.
Questia's powerful research tools allow you to highlight, take notes, bookmark and even create instant citations and bibliographies. To use these features and save hours of work, you must create a Questia account.
Need a Questia account? Sign up for a FREE trial now. Save time, stress and hassle, and get better grades with trusted, online research.
