Psychology 1000 Chapter 7: Learning and Adaptation the role of experience .doc
16 Apr 2015
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Learning is a process by which experience produces a relatively enduring change in an organism"s behaviour or capabilities. The study of learning was guided along two paths: behaviourism and ethology. Behaviourism focused on how organisms learn, and behaviourists assume that there are laws of learning that apply to virtually all organisms. Behaviourists explain learning solely in terms of directly observable events and avoided speculating about an organism"s unobservable mental state . Ethology focuses on animal behaviour within the natural environment. Ethologists argued that because of evolution, every species comes into the world biologically prepared to act in certain ways. A fixed action pattern is an unlearned response automatically triggered by a particular stimulus. Some fixed action patterns could be modified by experience. Many cases that appeared to be instinctive behaviour involved learning. There were striking differences in what species learned in order to survive. The two theories of learning have diverged into two different types of proposed adaptation:
