In reviewing this or any chapter, it is useful to think not just about the relationships among ideas within each major section, but also about the relationships among ideas across sections. One way to do that, for the present chapter, is to think about the three different perspectives on learning that are referred to at various places in the chapter: the behavioral, cognitive, and evolutionary perspectives. A perspective is a point of view, a framework, a set of ground rules and assumptions that scientists bring to the topic studied. The perspective helps determine the kinds of questions asked, the kinds of evidence regarded as important, the kinds of studies conducted, and the vocabulary used to describe the observations. Here are some thoughts about each of the perspectives referred to in this chapter:
1. The behavioral perspective Behaviorists such as Watson and Skinner held strongly to two assumptions: (1) the assumption that behavior is shaped by the environment and (2) the assumption that all aspects of behavior, including learning, are best described in terms of observable stimuli and responses, without reference to unseen mental events. These assumptions led behaviorists to focus heavily on classical and operant conditioning. Conditioning, from the behaviorists’ viewpoint, is something that is done to the animal (or person) by the environment. The environmental conditions that produce learning, in these cases, can be described in terms of relationships among stimuli in the environment or between responses and stimuli (including reinforcing stimuli), and learning can be quantified in terms of immediate changes in behavior (increased frequency of conditioned responses). Borrowing from Pavlov’s terms for describing classical conditioning, and adding a parallel set of terms for operant conditioning, behaviorists brought to psychology a rich, objective vocabulary for talking about learning and many learning-related phenomena. That vocabulary is still very much a part of psychology today.
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2. The cognitive perspective Among the pioneers of this perspective were psychologists, such as Tolman, who began as behaviorists but found that approach too limiting. They argued that you can go only so far in understanding learning (or anything else in psychology) without talking about mental processes. For example, you can establish the principle of stimulus generalization in classical and operant conditioning, but you can’t predict the degree to which an individual will generalize from one stimulus to another unless you understand something about the individual’s mental concepts. Depending on concepts, a person or animal can perceive two stimuli as similar even if they aren’t physically similar. Cognitive psychologists have helped solve the problem of what is learned in classical and operant conditioning, and in addition, expanded the realm of learning research to include learning that stems from exploration and observation, which does not always manifest itself immediately in the animal’s behavior. To be scientifically useful, however, cognitive constructs must make testable predictions about observable behavior, and most cognitive research involves such tests.
3. The evolutionary perspective This is the perspective that most clearly unites the two chapters on adaptation—the preceding one on evolution and the present one on learning. While behaviorism and cognitivism have roots in philosophy, which has traditionally tried to understand human behavior and the human mind in terms of general principles that have wide applicability (such as principles of mental associations and the law of effect), the evolutionary perspective grew out of biology, which recognizes the diversity of life processes. The view that learning mechanisms are products of natural selection implies that they should be specially designed to solve biologically significant problems pertaining to survival and reproduction. In this chapter, the evolutionary perspective manifested itself most clearly in research having to do with the value of conditioning in helping animals to predict biologically significant events (such as foods, dangers, and opportunities for sex); the role of play in motivating animals to practice life-sustaining skills; the special human adaptations for observational learning; and the specialized, domain-specific learning mechanisms (such as for food preferences, fear learning, imprinting on the mother, and place learning) that are unique to certain species.