Conditioning and Learning

• Learning allows a change in response to experience and allows for behaviours that are too complex to encode genetically. It increases fitness to many changing environments.
• Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour because of experience. It’s also defined as an adaptive process that allows an animal to match its behaviour to the environment that it finds itself in.
• Non-associative learning:

  • Imprinting. 
  • Habituation. 
  • Sensitisation & desensitisation. 
• Associative learning:

  • Classical Conditioning (Pavlovian) 
  • Operant Conditioning (Skinnerian)