Learning About Learning (Chapter 6)

The topic covered by chapter 6 is learning. The first section is about classical conditioning, which the book defines as a form of learning in which animals respond to a previously neutral stimulus that has paired with another stimulus that causes an automatic response.I found it interesting that the book showed how classical conditioning plays a role in advertising, fears, fetishes, and even disgust reactions. This chapter also covers another type of conditioning, called operant conditioning, which is defined as learning controlled by the consequences of the organism's behavior. This to me seemed like the type of learning that many of us know, and I immediately thought of dog training, which is given as an example of operant conditioning. The chapter then goes into discussing many different types of learning such as latent learning, observational learning, mirror neurons and observational learning, and many others. The one that I found to be the most interesting was sleep-assisted learning, and how in the beginning of sleep-assisted learning it was believed that it could work, as used by sailors and learning Morse code. This was a pseudoscientific belief and I found a picture from a magazine that shows this kind of learning and how people may have believed that it could help you learn something more efficiently using this method.