Learning

For the album by Perfume Genius, see Learning (album).
"Learn" and "Learned" redirect here. For other uses, see Learn (disambiguation) and Learned (disambiguation).
American students learning how to make and roll sushi
Cognitive psychology
Perception
Attention
Memory
Metacognition
Language
Metalanguage
Thinking
Numerical cognition

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.[1] The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants.[2] Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences.[3] The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved.[4]

Human learning starts at birth (it might even start before[5]) and continues until death as a consequence of ongoing interactions between people and their environment. The nature and processes involved in learning are studied in many established fields (including educational psychology, neuropsychology, experimental psychology, cognitive sciences, and pedagogy), as well as emerging fields of knowledge (e.g. with a shared interest in the topic of learning from safety events such as incidents/accidents,[6] or in collaborative learning health systems[7]). Research in such fields has led to the identification of various sorts of learning. For example, learning may occur as a result of habituation, or classical conditioning, operant conditioning or as a result of more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals.[8][9] Learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness. Learning that an aversive event cannot be avoided or escaped may result in a condition called learned helplessness.[10] There is evidence for human behavioral learning prenatally, in which habituation has been observed as early as 32 weeks into gestation, indicating that the central nervous system is sufficiently developed and primed for learning and memory to occur very early on in development.[11]

Play has been approached by several theorists as a form of learning. Children experiment with the world, learn the rules, and learn to interact through play. Lev Vygotsky agrees that play is pivotal for children's development, since they make meaning of their environment through playing educational games. For Vygotsky, however, play is the first form of learning language and communication, and the stage where a child begins to understand rules and symbols.[12] This has led to a view that learning in organisms is always related to semiosis,[13] and is often associated with representational systems/activity.[14]

  1. ^ Richard Gross, Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour Archived 2022-12-31 at the Wayback Machine 6E, Hachette UK, ISBN 978-1-4441-6436-7.
  2. ^ Karban, R. (2015). Plant Learning and Memory. In: Plant Sensing and Communication. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 31–44, [1] Archived 2022-12-31 at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ^ Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.
  4. ^ Daniel L. Schacter; Daniel T. Gilbert; Daniel M. Wegner (2011) [2009]. Psychology, 2nd edition. Worth Publishers. p. 264. ISBN 978-1-4292-3719-2.
  5. ^ OECD (2007). Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science. OECD Publishing. p. 165. ISBN 978-92-64-02913-2.
  6. ^ Sujan, M. A., Huang, H., & Braithwaite, J. (2017). Learning from incidents in health care: critique from a Safety-II perspective. Safety Science, 99, 115–121.
  7. ^ Hartley, David M.; Seid, Michael (2021). "Collaborative learning health systems: Science and practice". Learning Health Systems. 5 (3): e10286. doi:10.1002/lrh2.10286. PMC 8278439. PMID 34277947.
  8. ^ "Jungle Gyms: The Evolution of Animal Play". Archived from the original on October 11, 2007.
  9. ^ "What behavior can we expect of octopuses?". www.thecephalopodpage.org. The Cephalopod Page. Archived from the original on 5 October 2017. Retrieved 4 May 2018.
  10. ^ Learned helplessness at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  11. ^ Sandman, Wadhwa; Hetrick, Porto; Peeke (1997). "Human fetal heart rate dishabituation between thirty and thirty-two weeks gestation". Child Development. 68 (6): 1031–1040. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1997.tb01982.x. PMID 9418223.
  12. ^ Sheridan, Mary; Howard, Justine; Alderson, Dawn (2010). Play in Early Childhood: From Birth to Six Years. Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-83748-7.
  13. ^ Campbell, Cary; Olteanu, Alin; Kull, Kalevi 2019. Learning and knowing as semiosis: Extending the conceptual apparatus of semiotics Archived 2022-04-09 at the Wayback Machine. Sign Systems Studies 47(3/4): 352–381.
  14. ^ Hutchins, E., 2014. The cultural ecosystem of human cognition. Philosophical Psychology 27(1), 34–49.