Psychology Chapter 6 Learning

Learning is any relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience or practice.

Features of Learning:

(i) The first feature is that learning always involves some kinds of experience.

(ii) Behavioural changes that occur due to learning are relatively permanent.

(iii) Learning involves a sequence of psychological events.

Classical conditioning demonstrate learning by association:

This type of learning was first investigated by Ivan P. Pavlov. He was primarily interested in the physiology of digestion. During his studies he noticed that dogs, on whom he was doing his experiments, started secreting saliva as soon as they saw the empty plate in which food was served. Saliva secretion is a reflexive response to food or something in the mouth. Pavlov designed an experiment to understand this process in detail. He again used dogs. In the first phase,, a dog was placed in a box and harnessed. The dog was left in the box for some time. This was repeated a number of time on different days. In the meantime, a simple surgery was conducted, and one end of a tube was inserted in the dog’s jaws and the other end of the tube was put in a measuring glass.

In the second phase of the experiment, the dog was kept hungry and placed in a harness with one end of the tube ending in the jaw and the other end in the glass jar. A bell was sounded and immediately thereafter food (meat powder) was served to the dog. The dog was allowed to eat it. For the next few days, everytime the meat powder was presented, it was preceded by the sound of a bell. After a number of such trials, a test trail was introduced in which everything was the same as the previous trials except that no food followed sounding of the bell. The dog still salivated to the sound of the bell, expecting presentation of the meat powder as the bell had come to be connected with it. This association between the bell and food resulted in acquisition of a new response by the dog. i.e., salivation to the sound of the bell.

Food is thus an Unconditioned Stimulus (US) and salivation which follows it, an Unconditioned Response (UR). After conditioning, salivation started to occur in the presence of the sound of the bell. The bell becomes a Conditioned Stimulus (CS) and saliva secretion a Conditioned Response (CR). This kind of conditioning is called Classical conditioning. The learning situation in classical conditioning is one of S-S learning in which one stimulus (e.g., sound of bell) becomes a signal of another stimulus (e.g., food). Here one stimulus signifies the possible occurrence of another stimulus.

Conditioning of operant behaviour is called operant conditioning.

Factors that influence the course of operant conditioning.

(i) Types of reinforcement: Reinforcement may be positive or negative. Positive reinforcement involves stimuli that have pleasant consequences. They strengthen and maintain the responses that have caused them to occur. Positive reinforcers satisfy needs, which include food, water, medals, praise, money, status, information, etc. Negative reinforcers involve unpleasant and painful stimuli. Responses that lead organisms to get rid of painful stimuli or avoid and escape from them provide negative reinforcement. Thus, negative reinforcement leads to learning of avoidance and escape responses. For examples, one learns to put on woollen clothes, burn firewood or use electric heaters to avoid the unplesant cold weathers.

One learns to move away from dangerous stimuli because they provide negative reinforcement. But negative reinforcement is not punishment. Use of punishment reduces or suppresses the response while a negative reinforcer increases the probability of avoidance or escape response. For example drivers and co-drivers wear their seat belts to avoid getting injured in case of an accident on to avoid being fined by the traffic police.

No punishment suppresses a response permanently. Mild and delayed punishment has no effect. The stronger the punishment the more lasting is the suppression effect but it is not permanent.

Sometimes punishment has no effect irrespective of its intensity. On the contrary, the punished person may develop dislike and hatred for the punishing agent or the person who administers the punishment.

(ii) Number of Reinforcement and other Features: It refers to the number of trials on which an organism has been reinforced or rewarded. Amount of reinforcement means how much of reinforcing stimulus (food or water or intensity of pain causing agent) one receives on each trial. Quality of reinforcement refers to the kind of reinforcer. Chickpeas or pieces of bread are of inferior quality as compared with raising or pieces of cake as reinforcer. The course of operant conditioning is usually accelerated to an extent as the number, amount, and quality of reinforcement increases.

(iii) Schedules of Reinforcement: A reinforcement schedule is the arrangement of the delivery of reinforcement during conditioning trials. Each schedule of reinforcement influences the course of conditioning in its own way; and thus conditioned responses occur with differential characteristics. The organism being subjected to operant conditioning may be given reinforcement in every acquisition trial or in some trials it is given and in others it is omitted. Thus, the reinforcement may be continuous or intermittent.

(iv) Delayed Reinforcement: The effectiveness of reinforcement is dramatically altered by delay in the occurrence of reinforcement. It is found that delay in the delivery of reinforcement leads to poorer level of performance. It can be easily shown by asking children which reward they will prefer for doing some chore. Smaller rewards immediately after doing the chore will be preferred rather than a big one after a long gap.

A good role model is very important for a growing-up child. Children learn by observing others. They observe others and emulate their behaviour. Bandura, through his studies, has shown how children of different groups follow their role models. He showed a film of five minutes duration to children. The film shows that in a large room there are numerous toys including a large sized ‘Bobo’ doll. Now a grown-up boy enters the room and looks around. The boy starts showing aggressive behaviour towards the toys in general and the bobo doll in particular. He hits the doll, throws it on the floor, kicking it and sitting on it. This film has three versions. In one version a group of children see the boy (model) being rewarded and praised by an adult for being aggressive to the doll. In the second version another group of children see the boy being punished for his aggressive behaviour. In the third version the third group of children are not shown the boy being either rewarded or punished.

After viewing a specific version of the film all three groups of children were placed in an experimental room in which similar toys were placed around. The children were allowed to play with the toys. These groups were secretly observed and their behaviour noted. It was found that those children who saw aggressive behaviour being rewarded were most aggressive; children who had seen the aggressive model being punished were least aggressive. Thus, in observational learning observers acquire knowledge by observing the model’s behaviour, but performance is influenced by model’s behaviour being rewarded or punished.

Children observe adults’ behaviours at home and during social ceremonies and functions. They enact adults in their plays and games. For instance, young children play games of marriage ceremonies, birthday parties, thief and policeman, house keeping, etc. Actually they enact in their games what they observe in society, on television, and read in books.

Children learn most of the social behaviours by observing and emulating adults. The way to put on clothes, dress one’s hair, and conduct oneself in society are learned through observing others. It has also been shown that children learn and develop various personality characteristics through observational learning. Aggressiveness, prosocial behaviour, courtesy, politeness, diligence, and indolence are acquired by this method of learning.

In the study of verbal learning, psychologists use a variety of materials including non-sense syllables, familiar words, unfamiliar words, sentence, and paragraphs.

Procedures for studying verbal learning

1. Paired Associates Learning: This method is similar to S-S conditioning and S-R learning. It is used in learning some foreign language equivalents of mother tongue words. First a list of paired associates is prepared. The first word of the pair is used as the stimulus, and the second word as the response. Members of each pair may be from the same language or two different languages. A list of such word is given in Table given below:

Table: Examples of Stimulus - Response

Pairs used in Paired - Associates

Learning

2. Serial Learning: This method of verbal learning is used to find out how participants learn the lists of verbal items, and what processes are involved in it. First, lists of verbal items, i.e., non-sense syllables, most familiar or least familiar words, interrelated words, etc. are prepared. The participant is presented the entire list and it required to produce the items in the same serial order as in the list. In the first trial, the first item of the list is shown and the participant has to produce the second item. If s/he fails to do so within the prescribed time, the experimenter presents the second items. Now this item becomes the stimulus and the participant has to produce the third item that is the response word. If s/he fails, the experimenter gives the correct item, which becomes the stimulus item for the fourth words. This procedure is called serial anticipation method. Learning trials continue until the participant correctly anticipates all the items in the given order.

3. Free Recall: In this method, participants are presented a list of words, which they read and speak out. Each word is shown at a fixed rate of exposure duration. Immediately after the presentation of the list, the participants are required to recall the words in any order they can. Words in the list may be interrelated or unrelated. More than ten words are included in the list. The present order or words varies from trial to trial. This method is used to study how participants organise words for storage in memory. It has been observed that the items placed in the beginning or end of the lists are easier to recall than those placed in the middle, which are more difficult to recall.

Generalisation: When a learned response occurs or is elicited by a new stimulus it is called generalisation.

Example: Suppose an organism is conditioned to elicit a CR (Saliva secretion or any other reflexive response) on presentation of a CS (light or sound of bell). After conditioning is established, and another stimulus similar to the CS (e.g., ringing to telephone) is presented, the organisms make the conditioned response to it. This pehenomenon of responding similarly to similar stimuli is known as generalisation.

Discrimination: Discrimination is a response due to difference.

Example: Suppose a child is conditioned to be afraid of a person with a long moustache and wearing black clothes, in subsequent situation, when she/he meets another person dressed in black clothes with a beard, the child shows signs of fear. The child’s fear is generalised. She/he meets another stranger who is wearing grey clothes and is clean-shaven. The child shows no fear. This is an example of discrimination. Occurrence of generalisation means failure of discrimination. Discriminative response depends on the discrimination capacity or discrimination learning of the organism.

The terms transfer of learning is also termed as transfer of training or transfer effect. It refers to the effects of prior learning on new learning. Transfer is considered to be positive if the earlier learning facilitates current learning. If new learning is related then it is considered to be negative transfer. Absence of facilitative of retarding effect means zero transfer. Specific experimental designs are used by psychologists to study the transfer effects. For example, a person wants to know whether learning of English language affects learning of French. To study this he selects a large sample of participants. He randomly divide the sample into two groups, one to be used in the experimental condition and the other as control group.

The experimental group of participants learns English language for a year and is tested to find out their achievements in English. In the second year, they study French. In the end this group is tested to find out its achievement scores in French. The control groups in the first phase does not learn English language and just does it routine work for one year. In the second year, these participants learn French for a year and their achievement scores are obtained. The achievement scores in French of the two groups are then compared. If the achievement score of the experimental group is higher than that of the control group, it implies that positive transfer has taken place, if the score is lower than the control group, it means negative transfer has taken place, if the two groups perform equally well then it shows that transfer effect is zero.

All living organisms have survival needs. Human beings, besides the survival needs, have growth needs. Motivation is a mental as well as physiological state, which arouses an organisms to act for fulfilling the current need. It energises an organism to act vigorously for attaining some goal. Such acts persist until the goal is attained and the need is satisfied. Thus motivation is a prerequisite for learning. For examples a child forage in the kitchen when the mother is not in the house. S/he,does so because s/he needs sweets to eat for which s/he is trying to locate the jar in which sweets are kept. During the course of foraging the child learns the location of the jar. A hungry rat is placed in a box.

The animal forages in the box for food. Incidentally it presses a lever and food drops in the box. With repeated experience of such activity, the animal learns to press the lever immediately after the animal is placed there.

Preparedness for Learning: The members of different species are very different from one another in their sensory capacities and response abilities. The mechanisms necessary for establishing associations, such as S-S or S-R, also vary from species to species. It can be said that species have biological constraints on their learning capacities. The kinds of S-S or S-R learning an organism can easily acquire depends on the associative mechanism it is genetically endowed with or prepared for. A particular kind of associative learning is easy for apes or human beings but may be extremely difficult and sometimes impossible for cats and rats. It implies that one can learn only those associations for which one is genetically prepared.

In cognitive learning, there is a change in what the learner knows rather than what s/he does. There are two forms of cognitive learning. These are:

(i) Insight learning: It is a process by which the solution to a problem suddenly becomes clear. In a normal experiment on insight learning, a problem is presented followed by a period of time when no apparent progress is made and finally a solution suddenly emerges. In insight learning sudden solution is the rule. Once the solution has appeared, it can be repeated immediately the next time the problem is confronted. Thus what is learnt is a cognitive relationship between a means and an end. As a result, insight learning can be generalised to other similar problem situations.

Kohler performed a series of experiments with chimpanzees that involved solving complex problems. He placed chimpanzees in an enclosed play area where food was kept out of their reach. Tools such as poles and boxes were placed in the enclosure. The chimpanzees rapidly learned how to use a box to stand on or pole to move the food in their direction. In this experiment, learning did not occur as a result of trial and error and reinforcement, but came about sudden Hashes of insight. The chimpanzees would roam about the enclosure for some time and then suddenly would stand on a box, grab a pole and strike a banana, which was out of usual reach above the enclosure. The chimpanzees exhibited insight learning.

(ii) Latent learning: In this type of learning, a new behaviour is learned but not demonstrated, until reinforcement is provided for displaying it. Tolman through his experiment has explained the latent learning. He put two groups of rats in a maze and gave them an opportunity to explore. In one group rats found food at the end of the maze and soon learned to make their way rapidly through the maze. On the other hand, rats in the second group were not rewarded and showed no apparent signs of learning. But later when these rats were reinforced they ran through the maze as efficiently as the rewarded group.

According to Tolman the unrewarded rats had learned the layout of the maze early in their explorations. They just never displayed their latent learning until the Reinforcement was provided. Instead, the rats developed a cognitive map of the maze, i.e., a mental representation of the spatial locations and directions, which they needed to reach their goal.

The learning disabilities refer to a heterogenous group of disorders manifested in terms of difficulty in the acquisition of learning, reading, writing, speaking, reasoning, and mathematical activities. The sources of such disorders are inherent in the child. It is presumed that these difficulties originate from problems with the functioning of the central nervous system. It may occur in conjunction with physical handicaps, sensory impairment, mental retardation, or without them.

Learning disabilities may be observed as a distinct handicapping condition in children of average to superior intelligence, adequate sensory motor systems, and adequate learning opportunities. If it is not remedied, it may continue throughout life and affect self-esteem, vocation, social relations, and daily living activities.

Any relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience is termed as learning.

Simplest kind of learning is conditioning.

Changes due to practice and experience, which are relatively permanent, are illustrative of learning.

Behavioural changes that occur due to learning are relatively permanent.

Performance is a person’s observed behaviour or response or action.

The simplest kind of learning is called conditioning.

Food.

Salivation.

Operants are those behaviours or responses which are emitted by animals and human beings voluntarily and are under their control.

‘Skinner Boxes’ are specially made boxes in which Skinner conducted his studies on rats and pigeons.

A reinforcer is defined as any stimulus or event, which increases the probability of the occurrence of a response.

Responses that lead organisms to get rid of painful stimuli or avoid and escape from them provide negative reinforcement.

When a desired response is reinforced every time it occurs, it is called continuous reinforcement.

Reinforcement is the operation of administering a reinforcer by the experimenter.

Extinction means disappearance of a learned response due to removal of reinforcement from the situation in which the response used to occur.

When a learned response occurs or is elicited by a new stimulus, it is called generalisation.

Spontaneous recovery occurs after a learned response is extinguished.

In observational learning observers acquire knowledge by observing the model’s behaviour, but performance is influenced by model’s behaviour being rewarded or punished.

By observing and emulating adults.

The process by which the solution to problem suddenly becomes clear it is called insight learning.

In latent learning, a new behaviour is learned but not demonstrated until reinforcement is provided for displaying it.

A concept is a category that is used to refer to a number of objects and events.

A rule is an instruction to do something.

Transfer of learning refers to the effects of prior learning on new learning.

The responses acquired under partial reinforcement are highly resistant to extinction is called partial reinforcement effect.

Motivation is a mental as well as a physiological state, which arouses an organism to act for fulfilling the current need.

Learning style is defined as a learner’s consistent way of responding to and using stimuli in the context of learning.

The principles of learning are applied in organisations, treatment of maladjustive reactions, child-rearing, and school learning.

In verbal learning words get associated with one another on the basis of structural, phonetic, and semantic similarity and contrast.

Two kinds of unconditioned stimuli are apetative and aversive.

In many situations individuals does not know how to behave. They emulate their behaviour. This form of learning is called modeling.

Bandura studied about observational learning.

Imitation is the other name given to observational learning.

The main types of learning are: classical conditioning and operant conditioning, observational learning, cognitive learning, verbal learning, concept learning, and skill learning.

In classical conditioning an organism comes to associate stimuli.

Persons suffering from excessive shyness and having difficulties in interpersonal Interactions are subjected to assertive learning.

There are persons who lose mental peace with accelerated rate of breathing, loss of appetite, and rise in blood pressure at the slightest provocation. In such cases psycho-cherapists give biofeedback treatment.

Skill refers to the ability to carry out complex tasks smoothly and efficiently. It passes through cognitive, associative and autonomous phases.

Repeated experience of satisfaction after doing something in a specified manner leads to the formation of habit.

Yes. Example: A child strikes a matchstick on the side of a matchbox, and gets her/his fingers burnt. Such an experience makes the child learn to be careful in handling the matchbox in future.

Changes in behaviour may occur due to the effects of fatigue, habituation and drugs.

Suppose a person is trying to learn how to drive a motor car a time comes when he will feel tired. He stops driving. This is a behavioural change due to fatigue.

Two types of conditioning are: Classical conditioning, and instrumental/operant conditioning.

This type of learning was first investigated by Ivan P. Pavlov.

A person has just finished his lunch and feels satisfied. Then he sees some sweet dish served on the adjoining table. This signals its taste in his mouth, and triggers the secretion of saliva. He feels like eating it. This is a conditioning Response.

Suppose a child catches an inflated balloon which bursts in her hands making a loud noise. The child becomes afraid. Now the next time she is made to hold a balloon, it becomes a signal or cue for noise and elicits fear response. This happens because of contiguous presentation of balloon as a conditioned stimulus and loud noise as an unconditioned stimulus.

Some of the major factors influencing learning a CR are:

(i) Time relations between stimuli

(ii) Type of unconditioned stimuli

(iii) Intensity of conditioned stimuli.

In trace conditioning, the onset and end of conditioned stimulus proceeds the onset of unconditioned stimulus with some time gap between the two.

In backward conditioning, the unconditioned stimulus proceeds the onset of conditioned stimulus.

Appetitive unconditioned stimuli automatically elicits approach responses, such as eating, drinking, caressing, etc. These responses give satisfaction and pleasure.

Aversive unconditioned stimulus are painful, harmful and elicit avoidance and escape responses.

Positive reinforcement involves stimulate that have pleasant consequences. The strengthen and maintain the responses that have caused them to occur.

Food, water, medals, praise, money, status, information etc. are examples of positive reinforcers.

A list of words is learned by scientists by the following sequences:

(i) To do a pre-test to know how much the person knows before learning.

(ii) Present the list of words to be remembered for a fixed time.

(iii) During this time the list of words is processed towards acquiring new knowledge.

(iv) After processing is complete, new knowledge is acquired.

(v) After some time lapses, the processed information is recalled by the persons.

The basic experimental arrangements of different procedures of classical conditioning are as follows:

(i) When the CS and US are presented together, it is called simultaneous conditioning.

(ii) In delayed conditioning, the onset of CS precedes the onset of US. The CS ends before the end of the US.

(iii) In trace conditioning, the onset and end of the CS precedes the onset of US with sometime gap between the two.

(iv) In backward conditioning, the US precedes the onset of CS.   

Different approaches of learning style are as follows:    

(i) Perceptual Modality: These are biologically based reactions to the physical environment. It refers to the preferences of persons through which they take in information such as auditory, visual, smell, kinesthetic, and tactile.    

(ii) Information Processing: I distinguishes between the way we are structure to think, solve problems, and remember information. This may be thought of as the was we process information. For example, active reflective, sensing/intuitive, sequential/global serial/simultaneous, etc.    

(iii) Personality Patterns: These are the way we interact with our surroundings. Each one of us has a preferred, consistent, and distinct way of perceiving, organising, and retaining information. This approach focuses on understanding how personality affects the was people interact with the environment, and how this affects the way individuals respond to each other within the learning environment.

Latent Learning: It is a type of cognitive learning. In latent learning, a new behaviour is learned but not demonstrated until reinforcement is provided for displaying it. Tolman made an early contribution to the concept of latent learning. He puts two groups of rats in a maze and gave them an opportunity to explore. In one group, rats found food at the end of the maze and soon learned to make their way rapidly through the maze. On the other hand, rats in the second group were not rewarded and showed no apparent signs of learning. But later, when these rats were reinforced, they can through the maze as efficiently as the rewarded group.

Tolman contended that the unrewarded rats had learned the layout of the maze early in their explorations. They just never displayed their latent learning until the reinforcement was provided. Instead, the rats developed a cognitive map of the maze, i.e. a mental representation of the spatial locations and directions, which they needed to reach their goal.

According to Fitts, skill learning passes through the following three phases:

(i) Cognitive: In this phase of skill learning, the learner has to understand and memories the instructions, and also understand how the task has to be performed. In this phase, every outside cue, instructional demand, and one’s response outcome have to be kept alive in consciousness.

(ii) Associative: The second phase is associative. In this phase, different sensory inputs or stimuli are linked with appropriate responses. As the practice increases, errors decrease, performance improves and time taken is also reduced. With continued practice, errorless performance begins, though the learner has to be attentive to all the sensory inputs and maintain concentration on the task. Then the third phase, i.e., autonomous phase, begins.

(iii) Autonomous: In this phase, two important changes take place in performance : The attentional demands of the associative phase decrease, and interference created by external factors reduces. Finally, skilled performance attains automaticity with minimal demands on conscious effort.

Example of classical conditioning in everyday life is imagine that you have just finished your lunch and you are feeling satisfied. Then you see sweet dish in the other table. This signals its taste in your mouth. This is conditioned response.

Relationship of stages of conditioning and operations

Table: Similarity-Dissimilarity Relationship between the Initial and Subsequent Learning Tasks

Difference between analytic and relational styles of learning:

The principles of learning have great value for enriching human life in all spheres of life. Some of the applications of learning principles in treatment of maladjustive behaviours are as follows:

(i) In the case of those children and adults who exhibit irrational and unfounded fear with accompanying avoidance behaviour, implosive therapy and flooding are used. Implosive therapy starts with the person imagining their most feared form of contacl with the feared object, accompanied by vivid verbal descriptions by the therapist. The therapist functions as a coach. On the other hand, flooding is exposure that ( takes place in vivo. (e.g., with an actual feared object) and is considered to be the most effective of all treatments for fear.

(ii) To help those suffering from excessive anxieties and fears, the technique of systematic desensitisation is used. It is a form of behaviour therapy used to reduce phobic patients anxiety responses through counterconditioning, i.e. an attempt to reverse the process of classical conditioning by associating the crucial stimulus with a new conditioned response.

(iii) In order to eliminate habits that are undesirable and injurious for health and happiness, aversion therapy is used. The therapist arranges things in such a way that occurrence of maladjustive habits generates painful experiences and to avoid them clients learn to give them up. For example, alcohol is paired with an emetic drug (which induces severe nausea and vomiting) so that nausea and vomiting become a conditioned response to alcohol.

(iv) Modeling any systematic use of reinforcement for shaping and developing competence are extensively used.

(v) Persons suffering from excessive shyness and having difficulties in inter personal interactions are subjected to assertive learning. This therapy is also based on the principles of learning.

(vi) There are persons who lose mental peace with accelerated rate of breathing, loss of appetite, and rise in blood pressure at the slightest provocation. In such cases psychotherapists give biofeedback treatment. This technique is based on the interaction between classical and instrumental conditioning. In biofeedback, a bodily function (such as heart rate or blood pressure) is monitored and information about the function is fed back to the person to facilitate improved control of the physiological process.

Difference between classical and operant conditioning:

1. In classical conditioning, the responses are under the control of some stimulus because they are reflexes, automatically elicited by the appropriate stimuli. Such stimuli are selected as unconditioned stimulus and responses elicited by them as unconditioned response. Thus Pavlovian conditioning, in which unconditioned stimulus elicits responses, is often called respondent conditioning.

In instrumental conditioning responses are under the control of the organism and are voluntary responses or operants. Thus, in the two forms of conditioning different types of responses are conditioned.

2. In classical conditioning the conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus are well-defined, but in operant conditioning conditioned stimulus is not defined. It can be inferred but is not directly known.

3. In classical conditioning, the experimenter controls the occurrence of unconditioned stimulus while in operant conditioning the occurrence of the reinforcer is under the control of the organism, that is learning. Thus, for in classical conditioning the organism remains passive, while in operant conditioning the subject has to be active in order to be reinforced.

4. In the two forms of conditioning, the technical terms used to characterise the experimental proceedings are different. Moreover what is called reinforcer in operant conditioning is called unconditioned stimulus in classical conditioning. As unconditional stimulus has two functions. In the beginning it elicits the response and also reinforces the response to be associated and elicited later on by the conditioned stimulus.

Symptoms of learning disabilities:

There are many symptoms of learning disabilities. They became manifest in different combinations in children who suffer from this disorder irrespective of their intelligence, motivation, and hard work for learning.

1. Difficulties in writing letters, words and phrases, reading out text, and speaking appear quite frequently. Quite often they have listening problems, although they may not have auditory defects. Such children are very different from others in developing learning strategies and plans.

2. Learning-disabled children have disorders of attention. They get easily distracted and cannot sustain attention on one point for long. More often than not, attentional deficiency lead to hyperactivity, i.e., they aware always moving, doing different things, trying to manipulate things incessantly.

3. Poor space orientation and inadequate sense of time are common symptoms. Such children do not get easily oriented to new surroundings and get lost. They lack a sense of time and are late or sometimes too early in their routine work. They also show confusion in direction and misjudge right, left, up and down.

4. Learning-disabled children have poor motor co-ordination and poor manual dexterity. This is evident in their lack of balance, inability to sharpen pencil, handle doorknobs, difficulty in learning to ride a bicycle, etc.

5. These children fail to understand and follow oral directions for doing things.

6. They misjudge relationship as to which classmates are friendly and which ones are indifferent. They fail to learn and understand body language.

7. Learning-disabled children usually show-perceptual disorders. These may include visual, auditory, tactual, and kinesthetic misperception. They fail to differentiate a call-bell from the ring of the telephone. It is not that they do not have sensory acuity. They simply fail to use it in performance.

8. Fairly large number of learning-disabled children have dyslexia. They quite often fail to copy letters and words; for example they fail to distinguish between 6 and d, p and q, P and 9. was and saw, unclear and nuclear, etc. They fail to organise verbal materials.

D.

All of the above.

A.

an inferred process

B.

Conditioning

D.

All of the above

C.

B. F. Skinner

B.

Response

A.

Organism’s survival

D.

All of the above

A.

Insight learning

B.

latent learning

C.

concept

D.

All of the above

A.

Partial reinforcement

D.

All of the above

D.

All of the above