Discrimination learning
Encyclopedia
In psychology
, discrimination learning is the process by which animals or people learn to make different responses to different stimuli. It was a classic topic in the psychology of learning
from the 1920s to the 1970s, and was particularly investigated within:
While interest in the learning of discriminations has continued in all those fields, from about 1980 onwards the phrase "discrimination learning" was used less often as the main description either of individual studies or of a field of investigation. Instead, investigations of the learning of discriminations have tended to be described in other terms such as pattern recognition
or concept
discrimination. This change partly reflects the increasing diversity of studies of discrimination, and partly the general expansion of the topic of cognition within psychology, so that learning is not now the central organizing topic that it was in the mid-20th century.
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, discrimination learning is the process by which animals or people learn to make different responses to different stimuli. It was a classic topic in the psychology of learning
Psychology of learning
The psychology of learning is a theoretical science.Learning is a process that depends on experience and leads to long-term changes in behavior potential. Behavior potential designates the possible behavior of an individual, not actual behavior. The main assumption behind all learning psychology is...
from the 1920s to the 1970s, and was particularly investigated within:
- comparative psychologyComparative psychologyComparative psychology generally refers to the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals. However, scientists from different disciplines do not always agree on this definition...
, where a key issue was whether continuous or discontinuous learning processes were concerned in the acquisition of discriminations - human cognitive psychologyCognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
- the experimental analysis of behaviour, where a key issue was whether discriminations could be trained without the necessity for the subject to make errors
- developmental psychologyDevelopmental psychologyDevelopmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to...
, where a key issue was the changes that occur in the process of discrimination as a function of age - cross-cultural psychologyCross-cultural psychologyCross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental process, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions...
, where a key issue was the role that the cultural appropriateness of the stimuli to be discriminated played in the rate of acquisition of effective discrimination - mathematical psychologyMathematical psychologyMathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior...
, where attempts were made to formalise the distinctions being drawn in other branches of psychology.
While interest in the learning of discriminations has continued in all those fields, from about 1980 onwards the phrase "discrimination learning" was used less often as the main description either of individual studies or of a field of investigation. Instead, investigations of the learning of discriminations have tended to be described in other terms such as pattern recognition
Pattern recognition
In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...
or concept
Concept
The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...
discrimination. This change partly reflects the increasing diversity of studies of discrimination, and partly the general expansion of the topic of cognition within psychology, so that learning is not now the central organizing topic that it was in the mid-20th century.