Learning is any permanent change in behavior that can be attributed to experience. Learning isn't always the result of practice. It depends on what you mean by practice. Merely repeating a response will not necessarily produce learning. You could close your eyes and swing a tennis racket hundreds of time without learning anything about tennis.
Reinforcement is the key to learning. Any event that increases the probability that a response will occur again is reinforcement. An example would be a person trying to teach a dog a trick could reinforce correct responses by giving the dog some food each time it sits up. Learning can also occur in other ways. For example if a girl got stung by a bee she could learn to fear bees. In this case the girls fear is reinforced by the pain she felt when she got stung.
Unlocking the secrets of learning begins with noting what happens before and after a response. Events that precede
In the story of the dorm students the first observed that if they flushed the toilet while someone was in the shower they would scream a lot. After that for a period of time a whole flock of college students would twitch involuntarily whenever they heard a toilet flush. Soon they discovered that if they flushed all the toilets at once, the effect were multiplied many times over. The students reactions where the result of classical conditioning, a basic type of learning.
Psychologist used several terms to describe these events. A neutral stimulus is a stimulus that does not evoke a response, like the bell in the beginning part of Pavlov's experiment. Later that bell becomes a conditioned stimulus a stimulus that, because of learning, will evoke a response. The meat powder is an unconditioned stimulus, which is a stimulus innately capable of eliciting a response. Since a reflex is built in it is called an unconditioned respo
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