1. Introduction 1. Animals tend to live by an instinctive genetic code. For example, a salmon’s life is pretty much hard-wired into its genes – birth, youth in the stream, adulthood in the ocean, then return to the stream to spawn and die. 2. Humans also have an instinctive genetic code, but we however, can adapt to our environment and learn new behaviors and make changes. 3. Learning is defined as a relatively permanent behavior change due to experience. 4. This brings up the question, “How do we learn?” 1. We learn by making associations. This is connecting events that occur one after another. These events can be good, like connecting the birthday song to eating cake, or bad like seeing a flash of lightning then hearing loud thunder. 2. If a stimulus occurs normally in an environment, an animal’s natural response may dwindle. This lessening of a response is called habituation. Think of the stimulus as becoming habit, so why respond to it? 3. The examples above illustrate associative learning. 5. To a psychologist, “learning” is more specific than what we think of learning in school. To psychologists, there are three main types of learning… 4. Classical conditioning occurs when we associate two stimuli and thus expect a result. 5. Operant conditioning occurs when we learn to associate our own behavior (or our response) and its consequence. We therefore repeat behaviors with good results, we cut down on behaviors with bad results. 6. Observational learning occurs by watching others’ experiences. 7. One additional form of learning is through language. In this way, we can learn without experiencing something or watching someone else experience it. 2. Pavlov’s experiments 6. Classical conditioning falls under the psychological approach called behaviorism.