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. To have an idea of latent learning, we may briefly understand his experiment.
Tolman 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.
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.
V ERBAL L EARNING Verbal learning is different from conditioning and is limited to human beings. Human beings, as you must have observed, acquire knowledge about objects, events, and their features largely in terms of words. Words then come to be associated with one another. Psychologists have developed a number of methods to study this kind of learning in a laboratory setting.
Each method is used to investigate specific questions about learning of some kind of verbal material. In the study of verbal learning, psychologists use a variety of materials including nonsense syllables, familiar words, unfamiliar words (see Table . for sample items), sentences, and paragraphs. Methods used in Studying Verbal Learning .
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