Approximate reading time: 8 minutes

Birds build nests and migrate as winter approaches. Infants suckle at their parent’s breast. Dogs shake water off wet fur. Salmon swim upstream to spawn, and spiders spin intricate webs. What do these seemingly unrelated behaviours have in common? They all are unlearned behaviours. Both instincts and reflexes are innate (unlearned) behaviours that organisms are born with. Reflexes are a motor or neural reaction to a specific stimulus in the environment. They tend to be simpler than instincts, involve the activity of specific body parts and systems (e.g., the knee-jerk reflex and the contraction of the pupil in bright light), and involve more primitive centres of the central nervous system (e.g., the spinal cord and the medulla). In contrast, instincts are innate behaviours that are triggered by a broader range of events, such as maturation and the change of seasons. They are more complex patterns of behaviour, involve movement of the organism as a whole (e.g., sexual activity and migration), and involve higher brain centres.

Both reflexes and instincts help an organism adapt to its environment and do not have to be learned. For example, every healthy human baby has a sucking reflex, present at birth. Babies are born knowing how to suck on a nipple, whether artificial (from a bottle) or human. Nobody teaches the baby to suck, just as no one teaches a sea turtle hatchling to move toward the ocean. In terms of evolutionary pressure, genetic coding for such behaviour is adaptive. Newborns cannot survive if they have to learn to do these things. Babies need to feed and cannot learn to suck on something put into their mouth as this will not be feasible. Similarly, turtles need to reach the waters of the ocean immediately after hatching if they are to survive.  Learning, like reflexes and instincts, allows an organism to adapt to its environment. But unlike instincts and reflexes, learned behaviours involve change and experience; learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour or knowledge that results from experience. In contrast to the innate behaviours discussed above, learning involves acquiring knowledge and skills through experience. Looking back at our surfing scenario, Naomi will have to spend much more time training with their surfboard before they learn how to ride the waves like their parent, Yao. Learning requires a much more complex nervous system and is more expensive when viewed through the lens of evolution. However, there is an advantage; learning allows an organism to acquire a wider range of behavioural responses to changing environments. If sea levels recede but mother turtles continue to lay their eggs at the same locations as they did before, the instinct to reach the ocean will make hatchlings continue their genetically coded behaviour and they will have to travel farther and farther to reach the ocean, resulting in more deaths., earned behaviour will change and adapt as the environment changes, making the species more resistant to sudden fluctuations in their environment.

Learning to surf, like any complex learning process (e.g., learning about the discipline of psychology), involves a complex interaction of conscious and unconscious processes. Learning has traditionally been studied in terms of its simplest components—the associations our minds automatically make between events. Our minds have a natural tendency to connect events that occur closely together or in sequence. Associative learning occurs when an organism makes connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment. You will see that associative learning is central to all three basic learning processes discussed in this chapter: classical conditioning tends to involve unconscious processes; operant conditioning tends to involve conscious processes; and observational learning adds social and cognitive layers to all the basic associative processes, both conscious and unconscious. These learning processes will be discussed in detail later in the chapter, but a brief overview of each will help you as you begin to explore how learning is understood from a psychological perspective.

In classical conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning, organisms learn to associate events, or stimuli, that repeatedly happen together. We experience this process throughout our daily lives. For example, you might see a flash of lightning in the sky during a storm and then hear a loud boom of thunder. The sound of the thunder naturally makes you jump (loud noises stimulate that reflex). Because lightning reliably predicts the impending boom of thunder, you might associate the two and jump when you see lightning. Psychological researchers study this associative process by focusing on what can be seen and measured: behaviours. Researchers ask, “if one stimulus triggers a reflex, can we train a different stimulus to trigger that same reflex?” In operant conditioning, organisms learn, again, to associate events: a behaviour and its consequence (reinforcement or punishment). A pleasant consequence encourages more of that behaviour in the future, whereas a punishment deters the behaviour. Imagine you are teaching your dog, Hodor, to sit. You tell Hodor to sit, and give them a treat when they do. After repeated experiences, Hodor begins to associate the act of sitting with receiving a treat. Hodor learns that the consequence of sitting is that he gets a doggie biscuit (Figure LE.2). Conversely, if the dog is punished when exhibiting a behaviour, it becomes conditioned to avoid that behaviour (e.g., receiving a small shock when crossing the boundary of an invisible electric fence).

Observational learning extends the effective range of both classical and operant conditioning. In contrast to classical and operant conditioning, in which learning occurs only through direct experience, observational learning is the process of watching others and then imitating what they do. A lot of learning among humans and other animals comes from observational learning. To get an idea of the extra effective range that observational learning brings, consider Yao and their child, Naomi, from the introduction. How might observation help Naomi learn to surf, as opposed to learning by trial and error alone? By watching their parent, Naomi can imitate the moves that bring success and avoid the moves that lead to failure. Can you think of something you have learned how to do after watching someone else?

All of the approaches covered in this chapter are part of a particular tradition in psychology, called behaviourism, which we discuss in the next section. However, these approaches do not represent the entire study of learning. Separate traditions of learning have taken shape within different fields of psychology, such as memory and cognition, so you will find that other chapters round out your understanding of the topic. Over time these traditions tend to converge. For example, in this chapter you will see how cognition has come to play a larger role in behaviourism, whereas more extreme adherents once insisted that behaviours are triggered by the environment with no intervening thought.

Image Attributions

Figure LE.2. Photo by Ahmet Kurt on Unsplash.