Types of Learning

We can classify learning in a dozen ways from general to the specific. Making general distinctions, psychologists have divided learning categories:

A. Conditioning: Generally speaking, the individual has to learn about the stimulus or the response/group of responses. If we learn something about a stimulus, it is perceptual learning. But when we learn to make a particular response or a group of responses, it is called response learning. Response learning could be single or multiple-response learning.

When an individual learns a single response associated with a specific stimulus or a stimulus situation, it is conditioning. Conditioning, where; using the sequence of pairing a conditional stimulus (CS) with an unconditioned stimulus (US), a conditioned response (CR) is learned. In this way, a number of conditional responses can be learned.

This type of conditioning occurs in human as well as animal subject, single-response learning can be subdivided into classical conditioning, operant learning, and aversive conditioning.

B. Motor Learning: It is also labelled as psychomotor learning or skill learning. This includes all kinds of things, people learn to do, such as eating with a spoon or fork, swimming, typewriting, drives a car etc. Learning of such skills depends upon maturity, sensory-motor coordination and integration of the responses related to the intended skill learned at initial preliminary stages.

C. Discrimination Learning: We see that animal and human beings discriminate between a number of things in daily life. The general feature of this type of learning is that the subject has to differentiate between the two stimuli which occur to him simultaneously or in close succession and one or the other is frequently rewarded or punished. Differentiation between mother and a stranger, a dog and a doll, a taste of learning. Three important situations of discrimination learning are probability learning, incidental learning and reversal learning.

D. Verbal learning: It is the most important kind of learning for human beings because it involves words and formal education situations, and even the most informal learning in older children and adults occur by the verbal route. It also provides an important link between elementary nonverbal learning processes on one hand and learning of language and thought on the other.

E. Concept Learning: It is more specifically meant for human subjects. Learning a concept is learning to react to some common property/properties in a group of objects. In children, concept learning starts at a very young age. At a very early stage, they try to learn about various stimuli of the environment and attach verbal labels for them, such as a house, wood, fruit, man, girl etc.

Once the concepts are learned, they are manipulated in language and thinking. At a higher stage of learning, power of thinking and judgment is developed, and the individual becomes capable of solving the problem in his own way.

F. Problem –Solving: This is the highest level of learning. In problem-solving learning, a problem is given to the organism, which discovers some of its relationship with its environment by some sort of manipulation. In fact, problem-solving in human beings and higher animals like chimpanzees is certainly more than operant conditioning.

Human beings very occasionally in solving their problems by more trial and error method. They make use of prior verbal learning; they evaluate the whole situation, employ verbal reasoning, and sometimes also use trial and error activity, and ultimately some solution to the problem is found out. Gestalt Psychologists have made a series of experiments in this direction.