Learning theory

Learning theory is a family of psychological accounts that explain changes in behavior through experience, including conditioning, reinforcement, and observation.

Classical conditioning: A learning process in which a stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with another stimulus. It explains learned responses through associations between stimuli.
Edward Thorndike: An American psychologist whose experiments on animal learning helped establish the law of effect. His work anticipated the consequence-based account later developed in operant conditioning.
Behaviorism: A psychological approach that emphasizes observable behavior and its relations to environmental conditions. Learning theory supplied behaviorism with mechanisms for explaining behavioral change.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes such as memory, attention, reasoning, and language. It treats internal processes as necessary explanatory targets, unlike strict behaviorist accounts.
Operant conditioning: A learning process in which consequences change the likelihood of a behavior recurring. It explains how consequences shape voluntary behavior.
John B. Watson: An American psychologist who helped establish behaviorism as a school focused on observable behavior. He argued that psychology should explain behavior through learning and environmental conditions.
Learning: A relatively lasting change in knowledge or behavior resulting from experience. It is the broad phenomenon that learning theories attempt to explain.
Social learning theory: Albert Bandura's account of learning through observation, imitation, and interactions between person, behavior, and environment. It retains learning from experience while giving cognition and social observation explicit roles.
Reinforcement: A consequence that increases the future likelihood of a behavior. It is the central consequence-based mechanism in operant accounts.
Ivan Pavlov: A Russian physiologist known for experimental research on conditioned reflexes. His experiments provided a foundational model of learning through stimulus association.

Linked from 10 pages