Learning and memory. An introduction.

Let me ask you a few questions: How do you drink water from a glass, or how do you walk? I know what you are thinking, "I grab the glass and take it to my mouth to drink water", "I keep my foot after the other one to walk", or most probably "Why is he asking stupid questions". Perhaps, all (or maybe not) of your answers are true. But what if I ask: how did you learn those actions and when did you learn? Obviously, you will have a generic answer, and obviously, we are not looking for them, and again obviously, I will try to answer these questions with the help of what I am learning currently, in Cognitive Sciences.  

You all may have heard about the concepts of learning and memory, and to give you guys a trailer, "We learn and keep it into our memory to do things like drinking water, walking and yes being able to say, Why is he asking stupid questions". And what if learning or memory is impaired?: Bingo you guessed it right, we won't learn new things, we will forget what we had learned, or both and become non-functional. Lachman (1997), mentioned in his paper, "A more objective and accurate definition of learning than that commonly found in psychology textbooks is proposed. Learning is a relatively permanent behaviour change brought about by practice or experience". However, he saw ambiguity in this definition and gave his own, i.e., "Learning is the process by which a relatively stable modification in stimulus-response relations is developed as a consequence of functional environmental interaction via the senses." If you are a newbie, possibly you are struggling with the words, such as stimulus-response and others, don't worry I am gonna cover all of those. 

But first let's talk about a bit history of learning and memory, i.e., who said what ;

A few days ago while discussing about learning and memory in the classroom, many came up with their ideas. One said, "It is the knowledge of the previous stimuli and its consequences" whereas another said, "Firing pattern, and new synaptic connection". Well, all these ideas are nothing but a product of what we have learnt from history. The quest for the understanding of learning goes far back to the era of black-and-white philosophers. Starting from the start, Plato believed that, the most important pieces of knowledge are innate, Descartes supported rationalism, Aristotle went for empiricism and Kant, the diplomat one, said, we gain knowledge both innately and from the experience of the outer world. Aristotle also claimed his mind on memory by defining it as, "associationism", i.e., memory is formed through a linkage between a pair of events, sensations or ideas and so, which is nothing but 'learning'. Now, let's ask "IS IT?" does it require to form an association to have a memory of something? Of course, during their era, they hadn't yet developed the idea of types of memory, or the idea of reflexes. I know many will say that simple reflexes are innate and they are not learned, and they help in maintaining posture, avoiding pain etc. (Moini and Piran, 2020). However, it will be interesting to again contradict the contemporary idea and extend Aristotle's idea into an evolutionary perspective. We know why we have simple reflexes (that are not learned at least not by us), but they can be learned by our ancestors and looking into their advantages to our survival and reproduction they may have been included in our gene pool as hypothesized by Darwin. Now, that's something out of our concern for now. Let's get back on track. 

Following the philosophical war, on learning and memory. Wundt began experimental psychology, with the goal of to analyze an adult's mind from birth to present in simple definable components and see how these components fit together. Around the years 1850 to 1909, Ebbinghaus, contributed to the study of memory, with his forgetting curve, concluding that forgetting is not a linear but a curved function of time. Later, different learning rules came, like Thorndike's Law of Effect, Classical Conditioning, Operant Conditioning, Social Learning etc. And with all these, the school of behaviourism came into existence and was boosted. In this introductory blog, I want to just hover over every topic, so that we can talk about them later when I learn about them in deep. 

I just remembered, we also talked about, the Stimulus Sampling Theory, which supports associationism. The "Aha Moment", which is also termed as, one-step learning of humans, says, that out of nowhere we just do the right stuff, an example was given of the matchstick puzzle, where we need to move one stick to rearrange the setup. However, I don't completely believe in it, even if we show a behavioural action as Aha we do actions in our mind, we do multiple rearrangements of the sticks in our mind. Well, now it will be interesting to see if my belief changes or strengthens through my learning journey.

References

Lachman, S. J. (1997). Learning is a Process: Toward an Improved Definition of Learning. The Journal of Psychology, 131(5), 477–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223989709603535

Moini, J., Avgeropoulos, N. G., & Samsam, M. (2021). Anatomy and physiology. In Elsevier eBooks (pp. 3–40). https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-821736-8.00002-9