My Dear Reader (or MDR),
A brief recap…
Last week, we explored the world of Educational Psychologists and their relevance to the Nigerian society. One of the things you and I discovered in our last post was the core involvement of Educational Psychologists in learning and its processes. This brings us to the crux of our discussion today.
What is Learning?
Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience.
From this definition, it is safe to admit that the saying “experience is the best teacher” holds water.
How do we learn?
Psychologists believe that we learn in 3 major ways: association, observation, consequence. Today’s post, however, examines learning by association.
So what is learning by association?
Learning by association or classical conditioning occurs by pairing a natural stimulus with a neutral stimulus to produce a particular behaviour.
This phenomenon can be credited to Ivan Pavlov’s work on dogs. Pavlov rang a bell and presented food to his dogs which caused them to salivate. After a period of time, he noticed that only ringing the bell was sufficient to make the dogs salivate.
The concept of classical conditioning was birthed through this experiment and is still relevant in everyday life.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
Were you ever scared of thunderclaps? You would notice that thunderclaps and heavy rainfall usually go hand-in-hand but not every time.
If you ever paid attention you would notice that after some time heavy rainfalls would have you cowering behind your mother or underneath your blanket, even when there were no thunderclaps.
This right here is learning by association. Initially, thunderclaps initiated fear and heavy rainfall didn’t. But when thunderclaps were continuously followed by heavy rainfall, you started to fear heavy rainfalls too.
What you experienced my dear reader, is classical conditioning.
On a final note…
MDR, I hope you enjoyed this piece. Please subscribe (if you haven’t) and share with a friend. Also, thank you for reading this piece. I would like to hear your thoughts in the comments section.
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Thank you once again for reading. Till next week Friday, goodbye.
Cheers,
Ewoma Omoghene