The process by which an animal, including man, comes to modify or extend its behavior as the result of experience. Living itself - the use and development of the individual's powers -is learning to a large extent, whether we are talking about perception, social relationships, interest, knowledge, or skill.

Learning may be associated with a conscious intellectual content as when learning a subject or the way from one place to another, or it may be associated with the acquisition of a skill much of which is built-in unconsciously through repeated attempts. A person who knows the way can tell someone else how to get there; but a skilful swimmer may be quite unable to describe on what precisely his ability depends.

Learning may be a crude trial and error process as when a stranger seeks to learn where everything is kept in an unfamiliar room. Or it can be more insightful as when previous experience is brought to bear on learning something new - for example playing squash after learning tennis. Learning can also be imitative. Young children learn readily by imitation, and a beginner with a flair for some activity - such as skiing or playing golf - may pick up a lot from watching others do it. Trial and error, insight, and imitation are involved together in many learning activities.

Learning can be affected considerably by the motive for learning, the readiness to learn, the intelligence of the learner, circumstances of the learning situation, the intelligibility of what has to be learned, and the outcome of the effort to learn. A child who wants to learn to read, and who has reached a stage of maturity when he is full ready to learn, will learn to read much faster, other things being equal, than another child who lacks motive and is not yet ready for the task. The outcome of the effort to learn is extremely important; the achievement of success reinforced whatever activity has lead up to the success. Intensity of experience is also significant: an error in amateur electronics that blows the fuses is unlikely to be repeated, whereas a mistake with less spectacular results - a spelling inaccuracy for example - may be be eliminated for a long time.

Various attempts have been made to reduce the dynamics of learning to a system embracing all the phenomena associated with it. E.L.Thorndike promulgated his so-called Laws of Learning, stress such elements as repetition, readiness, practice, vividness, and effect. The gestalt psychologists laid stress upon the importance of insight in learning, Ivan P. Pavlov described learning as a conditioning process. Skinner, Hull, and others extended simple conditioning into more complex systems that treat learning as basically habit formation; a stimulus in the environment, acting on a particular individual, produces a response from that individual which, if rewarding in its results, quickly gets established as a habit of response to a particular stimulus or to similar stimuli. The psychoanalytical schools point out how profoundly an individual's learning capacity may be influenced by his emotional condition and the motives deriving therefrom: a child may be unable to learn mathematics because he wants to punish an over-ambitious parent, or because he refuses to enter into competition with a brilliant older brother.

A much discussed question is how far what is acquired in one field transfers to another. Will learning Latin, for example, make an individual precise and logical in other fields? The answer would appear to be that principles will transfer from one area to another if they are both understood and valued by the learner; if the principles are not understood or are imposed, and therefore rejected, the individual may react away from them as soon asa he gets a chance to do so. A bored Latin scholar may long for an opportunity to be wildly imprecise, but a keen linguist will enjoy applying what he learns in one language to the understanding of another. In mechanical tasks what has to be learned in one situation may actually impede what has to be learned in another. A person who drives two cars, each with a different arrangement of switches and gear-lever movements, may find himself constantly confused.

Age and fatigue and drugs all affect learning. Older, people pick up things less readily than when they were young but can compensate for his in familiar areas by bringing past experience to the new task.

Prepared by: C.K.Mohamed/Tellicherry

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