Theories of Learning (Part 3)

Wilhelm Wundt, who founded the first psychological laboratory (1879), denied rationalism. He devised experimental methods for measuring reactions to physical and physiological changes, effects and stimulations. But he did not consider the physiological aspect to be all of psychology. He was concerned with introspection, with analysis of "internal experience."

He was convinced that the combination of the will, and emotional states closely connected with it, was more important than sensations and ideas in the explanation of psychological experience.

Another physiological-psychological approach was presented by Herbert Spencer (1855), who saw man as an organism adapting to its environment. He felt that sensations are man's natural guides and his most trustworthy ones—"when not rendered morbid by long-continued disobedience." This thought derived from his belief that man's senses were formed in accordance with the all-embracing law of evolution from a less perfect to a more perfect state.

William James knew both Spencer and Wundt, but rejected their principles (1890). He theorized that all learning begins in experience, that knowledge comes through an act of consciousness motivated by necessity. Thinking, he said, is made up partly of perception and partly of idea formation. It is an intensely personal thing, highly influenced by emotion. It was James who first offered the 'stream of consciousness hypothesis.'

He said, "Objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order or sequence as before. The laws of motor habit in the lower center of the nervous system are disputed by no one. A series of movements repeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselves with particular ease in that order for ever afterward. Number one awakens number two, which awakens number three, and so on, until the last is produced. A habit of this kind, once become inveterate, may go on automatically. And so it is with the objects with which our thinking is concerned."

Aristotle also described the nature of associative learning and explained the phenomenon of recall in terms of its laws. All psychologists since Aristotle have observed the rule of association by contiguity in time. Popular proverbs also bear out the observations: a burnt child dreads the fire; a person once bitten is twice shy; etc. Berkeley referred to "an habitual and customary connection" between ideas, one being the occasion for the next. Hume wrote of a "gentle force" by which one idea "naturally introduces another" if these ideas have previously occurred together.

James Mill (1829) concurs with these theories: "Our ideas spring up, or exist, in the order in which the sensations existed, of which they are copies. That is the general law of the 'association of ideas/ by which term nothing is here meant to be expressed but the order of occurrence." Mill felt the association of ideas could be either concurrent or successive, and that the association's strength was measurable in terms of its permanence, its certainty and its "facility." He further believed that frequency and vividness determined the strength of an association.