Thorndike And Skinner's Perspective: Learning Major Concepts Of Learning

Learning is shorthand for a collection of different techniques, procedures, and outcomes that produce changes in an organism’s behaviour. Learning psychologists have identified and studied as many as 40 different kinds of learning. However, there is a basic principle at the core of all of them. Learning involves some experience that results in a relatively permanent change in the state of the learner. This definition emphasizes several key ideas: Learning is based on experience; learning produces changes in the organism; and these changes are relatively permanent. Learning can be conscious and deliberate or unconscious. The conscious learning takes place with an explicit awareness of the learning process. In comparison, the unconscious learning

The two most important behaviourists were Thorndike and Skinner.

Thorndike’s behaviourism is generally called as “Connectionism” For Thorndike, the connection between stimuli and response are most importantly controlled by “Law of effect” i.e. a response to a stimulus is strengthened or reinforced when it is followed by a positive rewarding effect.

In Skinner’s system, all of these emitted behaviours“operated” on the environment in some manner, and the environment responded by providing events that either strengthened those behaviours (i.e., they reinforced them) or made them less likely to occur (i.e., they punished them). Skinner’s elegantly simple observation was that most organisms do not behave like a dog in a harness, passively waiting to receive food no matter what the circumstances. Rather, most organisms are like cats in a box, actively engaging the environment in which they find themselves to reap rewards. Skinner’s approach to the study of learning focused on reinforcement and punishment. a reinforce is any stimulus or event that functions to increase the likelihood of the behaviour that led to it, where as a punisher is any stimulus or event that functions to decrease the likelihood of the behaviour that