Lesson 7

• Noun: a word that represents a person, place, thing, or idea.
• Learning may be defined as a process that brings about a change in an individual’s way of responding as a result of practice or other experiences.
• Psychologists define thinking as brain activity in which we mentally manipulate information, including words, visual images, sounds, or other data.
• Learning may also be defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior.
• Thinking transforms information into new and different forms, allowing us to answer.
• Behavior changes with experience.
• New patterns of behavior take place when the organism senses its world, interprets it, responds to it, and then responds to the consequences of its own responses.
• Once the organism has passed through this cycle, it is never the same again.
• Memory is a term used to label the way facts and past experiences are impressed, retained and later recalled.
• Memory is the power of remembering past objects and stages of consciousness.
• Memory is a by-product of learning, it is that which is left over or retained after an interval of time.
• To have a good memory means that the individual has learned the appropriate responses.
• He has retained these effects of impression.
• Theories of Learning: Pavlov and Classical Conditioning
• Classical conditioning involves the learning of associations between stimuli, in situations where responses are reflexive or habitual.
• Ivan Pavlov, around the beginning of the 20th century, was a Russian physiologist interested mainly in animal digestive processes.
• Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) started as the Social Learning Theory (SLT) in the 1960s by Albert Bandura.
• The law of effect principle developed by Edward Thorndike suggested that: "responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation.
• Psychologists distinguish between three necessary stages in the learning and memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval.
• Classical conditioning involves the learning of associations between stimuli, in situations where responses are reflexive or habitual.
• Memory is the power of remembering past objects and stages of consciousness.
• Memory is a term used to label the way facts and past experiences are impressed, retained and later recalled.
• Memory is a by-product of learning, it is that which is left over or retained after an interval of time.
• Wolfgang Kohler observed chimpanzees and saw that animals are capable of acquiring a new response in one burst of insight, wherein the solution of a problem becomes suddenly clear.
• Operant conditioning involves the learning of association between responses and consequences, in situations where behavior is voluntary.
• The earliest and best-known experiments on insightful learning were done by Wolfgang Kohler, a Gestalt psychologist.
• Social Cognitive Theory posits that learning occurs in a social context with a dynamic and reciprocal interaction of the person, environment, and behavior.
• To have a good memory means that the individual has learned the appropriate responses and has retained these effects of impression.
• In Pavlov’s research, dogs had special tubes surgically inserted into their throats to allow measurement of their salivation in response to being fed.
• Pavlov became puzzled by the observation that the dogs often salivated before the food was actually placed in their mouths, and even when lab assistants simply approached the dogs with or without food.
• Pavlov dubbed this phenomenon “psychic secretions,” an illusion to some kind of covert process.
• People store past events and patterns in their long-term memory, also known as episodic or semantic memory.
• Sensory memory is related to your ability to retain impressions from the sensations you experience.
• The information is transferred to short-term memory or working memory, which allows someone to mull things over and hold key information in their mind.
• Procedural memory, also called motor memory, is a type of implicit memory.
• Explicit memory is a type of long-term memory, and is the opposite of implicit memory.
• Short-term memory is where the brain stores short-term memories for about 20 to 30 seconds.
• Working memory is needed in learning and is used to retain and use information.
• Long-term memory is where you store life-time memories, your first kiss, your wedding day, and the birth of your baby.
• Memory is the faculty by which the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information.