Learning v. Not Learning

Learning: the act of acquiring new information that translates into new skills or actions

Learning

• How to ride a bike
• How to tie your shoes
• Reading
• Playing an instrument
• Solving a Rubik’s cube
• Walking
• Social skills/interaction
• Eating
• Showering
• EVERYTHING!

Not Learning

• The act of sleeping
• Breathing

Why study learning?

• It is ubiquitous

Goal of Psych and Behavioral Neuroscience

• Understand mechanisms of behavior and cognition
  • Predict behavior
    • Take in information from environment
  • Influence behavior
• Find all the variables that affect behavior through systematic observation

Paradigm for Understanding Behavior

• Environmental input goes into what makes up the individual goes into the output behavior

• Determinism: We make the assumption as scientists that there is a cause for everything
  • These determinants are knowable
• We want to be able to write an equation in order to make predictions

<aside> 💡 What is Learning?

• Environmental inputs (experience) change the mechanisms of behavior </aside>

• Change the input-output relation → changes in the individual/change in the Nervous System

• We have to figure out: what in the nervous system has changed?

• Learning affects things in all those systems!

  • Connections between different cells, brain areas, etc, change