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example,changesinbehaviouroftenoccurdue or action. Let us understand what is meant by totheeffectsoffatigue,habituation,anddrugs. the term inference. Suppose you are asked by Suppose you are reading your textbook of your teacher to memorise a poem. You read psychology for sometime or you are trying to that poem a number of times. Then you say learn how to drive a motor car, a time comes that you have learned the poem. You are asked when you will feel tired. You stop reading or to recite the poem and you are able to recite driving. This is a behavioural change due to it. The recitation of the poem by you is your fatigue, and is temporary. It is not considered performance. On the basis of your learning. performance, the teacher infers that you have Let us take another case of change in one’s learned the poem. behaviour. Suppose in the vicinity of your residence a marriage is being performed. It generates a lot of noise, which continues till P ARADIGMS OF LEARNING late night. In the beginning, the noise distracts Learning takes place in many ways. There are you from whatever you are doing. You feel some methods that are used in acquisition of disturbed. While the noise continues, you simple responses while other methods are make some orienting reflexes. These reflexes become weaker and weaker, and eventually used in the acquisition of complex responses. In this section you will learn about all these become undetectable. This is also one kind of methods. The simplest kind of learning is behavioural change. This change is due to called conditioning. Two types of conditioning continuous exposure to stimuli. It is called have been identified. The first one is called habituation. It is not due to learning. You must have noticed that people who are on sedatives classical conditioning, and the second instrumental/operant conditioning. In or drugs or alcohol, their behaviour changes addition, we have observational learning, as it affects physiological functions. Such cognitive learning, verbal learning, and skill changes are temporary in nature and disappear, as the effect wears out. learning. Learning involves a sequence of psychological events. This will become clear if C LASSICAL CONDITIONING we were to describe a typical learning experiment. Suppose psychologists are This type of learning was first investigated by interested in understanding how a list of words Ivan P. Pavlov. He was primarily interested in is learned. They will go through the following the physiology of digestion. During his studies he noticed that dogs, on whom he was doing sequence : (i) do a pre-test to know how much the person knows before learning, (ii) present his experiments, started secreting saliva as the list of words to be remembered for a fixed soon as they saw the empty plate in which time, (iii) during this time the list of words is food was served. As you must be aware, saliva processed towards acquiring new knowledge, secretion is a reflexive response to food or something in the mouth. Pavlov designed an (iv) after processing is complete, new knowledge is acquired (this is LEARNING), and experimenttounderstandthisprocessindetail (v) after some time elapses, the processed in which dogs were used once again. In the information is recalled by the person. By first phase, a dog was placed in a box and comparing the number of words which a harnessed. The dog was left in the box for some person now knows as compared to what s/he time. This was repeated a number of times on knew in the pre-test, one infers that learning different days. In the meantime, a simple did take place. surgery was conducted, and one end of a tube Thus, learning is an inferred process and was insertedinthedog’sjawandtheotherend is different from performance. Performance of the tube was put in a measuring glass. The is a person’s observed behaviour or response experimental setup is illustrated in Figure 5.1. 79 Chapter 5 • Learning Reprint 2026-27