What is Cognitive Learning?

The kinds of learning that we have considered thus for all stress the organization of behaviour into learned stimulus-response associations. In studying more complex forms of learning, attention must be given to the roles of perception and knowledge, or cognitive processes.

There is the possibility that emphasis upon stimulus-response associations may lead to too much concern for piecemeal activities and too little attention to organized relationship and meaning.

The teacher impressed by habit formation may use rote memorization and drill excessively, without caring enough about whether the child organizes and understands what is learned.

Those identified with the cognitive viewpoint argue that learning, particularly in humans, cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of stimulus-response associations. They propose that the learner forms a cognitive structure in memory, which preserves and organizes information about the various events that occur in a learning situation.

When a test is made to determine how much has been learned, the subject music encode the test stimulus and scan it against his memory to determine an appropriate action. What is done will depend upon the cognitive structure retrieved from memory, and the context in which the test occurs.

Thus the subject’s response is a decision process that varies with the nature of the test situation and the subject’s memory for prior events.

Even classical conditioning with animals is not interpreted by cognitive theorists as the formation of a new S-R association.

The animal is assumed to store in memory a record of the events that occurred in the experiment; when tasted this cognitive structure is retrieved and the animal’s response is determined by the information stored therein.

The animal is not learning to salivate automatically to the conditioned stimulus; it is learning to anticipate food, and it is the anticipation that causes him to salivate. At the level of classical conditioning the cognitive approach may seem cumbersome, but in analyzing complex forms of learning it offers more flexibility in theorizing than a strict S-R approach.

(a) Insight Learning:

Partly in protest against too much study on the kinds of learning that involve stimulus-response associations, Wolfgang Kohler, a German psychologist who emigrated to the United States, performed a series of dramatic experiments with chimpanzees.

At some point in working on a problem, chimpanzees appeared to grasp its inner relationships through insight; that is, they solved the problem not through mere trial and error, but by perceiving the relationships essential to solution.

(b) Factors Influencing Insight Learning:

The variables that influence insight learning are not well understood but a few general remarks can be made.

(i) Insight depends upon the arrangement of the problem situation:

Appropriate past experience, while necessary, does not guarantee a solution. Insight will come easily only if the essentials for solution are arranged to that their relationships can be perceived or example, a chimpanzee solves the stick problem more readily if the stick is on the same side of the cage as the food.

He has more difficulty if he must turn away from the food to see the stick. Human beings can do much of their rearranging of a problem mentally; they can form a mental image of the situation and rearrange objects in that image in an attempt to find a solution. Mental manipulations may at times go on preconsciously, and only when a solution has been found does the person suddenly realize that he had been thinking about the problem.

(ii) Once a solution occurs with insight, it can be repeated promptly:

Gradual solution appears to be the rule in trial-end-error learning. Sudden solution is the rule in insight. Once the chimpanzee has used a stick for pulling in a banana, he will seek out a stick on the next occasion.

(iii) A solution achieved with insight can be applied in new situations:

What is learned in the insight experiment is not a specific S-R sequence, but a cognitive relationship between a means and an end. Hence one tool may be substituted for another.

(c) Sign Learning:

Some learning classified as conditioned responses may actually involve learning the signs of “what leads to what.”

This was the contention of Edward C. Tolman, who believed that much learning is sign learning (Tolman, 1948). A rat running through a complex maze may be developing a kind of map, or cognitive structure, of the maze instead of learning merely a sequence of left and right turn. If a familiar path is blocked, the animal can adopt another route based on this understanding of spatial relationships.

Sign learning may be defined as an acquired expectation that one stimulus will be followed by another in a particular context.

Note that what is acquired is an expectation rather than a chained sequence of responses. Although the expectation may lead the animal to make a specific response, the response needs to be completely stereotyped.

That is, one response may be readily substituted for another, provided both lead to the same end point where the expected stimulus will be encountered. Thus a rat that has learned to run a maze to obtain food in the foal box will, if the maze is flooded with water, swim without error to the goal. The rat appears to have learned the location for the goal rather than a chain of specific stimulus-response connections.

Because what is learned is a set of expectations or a cognitive map of the environment rather than specific responses, sign learning classifies as learning with understanding rather than as conditioning.

(d) Latent Learning’:

Experiments on latent learning support the concept of cognitive structures. Latent learning, broadly conceived, refers to any learning that is not evidenced by behaviour at the time of the learning.

Typically, such learning goes on under low levels of drive or in the absence of reward. When drive is heightened or appropriate reinforcement appears, there is a sudden use of what has been previously learned.