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Our ability to learn seems boundless. We continue to learn new things every day, and we continually use the products of our past learning. Our learning affects how we perceive, remember, think, and behave. In this chapter, we will focus on what psychologists have learned about how we learn.

In general, two types of psychologists—behavioral psychologists and cognitive psychologists—have studied learning, and they have gone about their research in very different ways. Behavioral psychologists have focused on the learning of associations through classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning involves learning associations between events in our environment, such as that the smell of the turkey roasting in the oven signals that a delicious meal will follow. Operant conditioning focuses on learning associations between our behavior and its environmental consequences, such as that additional studying usually leads to better grades. Cognitive psychologists studying learning are interested in the more complex type of learning involved in human memory—how we encode information into our memory system, store it over time, and later retrieve it for use. A cognitive psychologist would be interested in how you learn the information in this textbook and what type of study technique would lead to the best memory for this information.

In this chapter, we will first focus on what behavioral psychologists have discovered about learning associations through classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Then we will consider some of the biological constraints upon such learning and also begin a discussion of the cognitive approach to learning (covered in detail in the next chapter, on how we remember).