Learning concepts and applications

Learning and Psychology

Learning is acquiring a new concept, information or knowledge that adds to the individual's mental map of realities and perceptions. This new concept, information, or knowledge is almost always translated into action or manifested through new or developed behavior. Learning and psychology are linked together because both fields study the individual mind, and how the mind incites behavior or action within the individual. In the study of learning, psychology is critical in understanding how human minds acquire information and translate them into actions or behavior. Through psychology, processes involved when the human mind is "learning" can be analyzed and interpreted through different perspectives: neuro-biological, socio-cultural, behavioral, or constructivist.

The above-mentioned perspectives are known as the broad approaches to understanding learning in the context of psychology. These approaches or perspectives provide researchers and practitioners of psychology to understand a specific psychological phenomenon, such as learning. Learning in the psychological context can be looked at through the behavioral perspective lens, which posits that learning can be conditioned given the appropriate stimuli that will encourage humans to learn. Another "lens" through which learning is studied is using the constructivist approach. Under this approach, learning occurs among individuals through their interactions with their social environment, composed of the physical environment and people and things in it. Social constructivism is another approach that puts importance to the individual's social environment as the main catalyst to his/her learning. The socio-cultural approach takes the social constructivist approach further, to include culture as the central focus of influence to the individual when it comes to learning.

Part 2

Perceptual learning is the type of learning that occurs based on the individual's worldview. This "worldview" is dependent on different factors or variables, which can be biological, geographical, social, cultural, political, and economic in nature. As such, an individual could learn differently based on biological factors, which almost always influences the nervous system of the human body. Developmental disability among individuals, for example, is a neurological (biological) condition that slows down mental development and in effect, hampers and slows down learning as well. Similarly, cultural differences could result to different learning modes, such as the prevalence of formal education among North American and European societies, as compared to the prevalence of oral (or verbal) education -- word-of-mouth learning from the elders to the young generation -- in African and South American societies.