Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (2012)

Learning is existential, and so its study must be complex and interdisciplinary.Over the past centuries, researchers from different fields have posited many theories to explain how humans and animals learn and behave, i.e., how they acquire, organize, and deploy knowledge and skills.Basically, learning is defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior and/or in mental associations due to experience.Learning is a response to environmental requirements and different from biological maturation, which, however, is a fundamental basis for learning.From a historical point of view, learning had been an issue of epistemology and philosophy since ancient times.Nevertheless, the twentieth century may be considered as the century of psychology of learning and related fields of interest, such as motivation, cognition, and metacognition.It is really fascinating to see the various currents of the twentieth century research in learning, remembering, and forgetting.And it is interesting to see that many basic assumptions of early theories have survived the paradigm shifts of psychology and epistemology that occurred during the twentieth century.Beyond folk psychology and naı ¨ve theories of learning, psychological learning theories can be grouped into several basic categories, such as behaviorist and connectionist learning theories, cognitive learning theories, and social learning theories.However, learning theories are not limited to psychology and related fields but can be traced back to ancient philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.It is certainly true that the topic of learning also played a significant role in the philosophy of the Middle Ages (e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas), and in the modern era philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, Locke, Kant, and many others were interested in the topic.The same holds true for philosophers of the twentieth century, who were highly interested in learning.It is noteworthy that the so-called fathers of psychology as a discipline, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and William James (1842-1910), were both originally professors of philosophy.In the 1880s, Wundt began studying rote learning of lists of nonsense verbal items, and a short time later, James foreshadowed many aspects of modern neurobiology of learning and even connectionist theory.Whereas Wundt and James remained closely aligned with the field of philosophy and the application of introspective self-observation, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) began studying human memory and higher cognitive processes (such as meaningful learning) by means of experimental methods.This transported the study of learning and remembering out of philosophy and into the realm of empirical research, providing valuable tools until today.Ebbinghaus' seminal work on learning and remembering can be considered as the beginning of systematic psychological research on learning and remembering for the twentieth century.Another strong influence was Pavlov's reflexology and his experiments with animals.This can be considered as the beginning of research on animal learning, which was also characteristic, to a large extent, of the emerging fields of associative psychology (e.g., Thorndike) and Gestalt psychology (e.g., Ko ¨hler).At the beginning of the twentieth century, these two sources -associative psychology and reflexologygave rise to connectionism and the idea of learning by trial and error, whose most prominent supporter became Thorndike .Clearly, the first half of this century was strongly influenced by connectionism (and behaviorism) and Gestalt psychology, whereas the second half can be considered as the period of the emergence of cognitive and constructivist conceptions of learning.Psychologists and biologists have studied learning in animals and humans within the realm of both paradigms.Nowadays, animal and human learning and cognition are separate but related fields of study within psychology and biology, each with an identifiable history that is often intertwined with the other.Beyond psychology and biology, disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and education focused on the topic of human learning in the course of the past centuries.However, one of the most important innovations for research on learning resulted from the emerging computer sciences and their focus on machine learning.