Latent Learning

By Author: vincent
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Learning is acquiring new or modifying knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. Learning is broadly classified into two types namely Simple non-associative learning and Associative learning. Latent learning is a form of learning which comes under the category of Associative learning. This type of learning is not eventually expressed immediate to its gain of knowledge neither expressed in an open manner. Latent learning is that which one cannot see until there is some incentive to exhibit it.

This type of learning may not be given prior importance but one should understand the difference between learning and performance. For example, two friends may go to work in the same vehicle and the latter is driving all the time. The other person may gain the knowledge to drive the vehicle just by observing but may not have exhibited his knowledge. Only when certain emergency situation may occur the importance of latent learning is demonstrated. Early behaviourists doing research in the first part of the 20th century, such as Clark Hull, O. H. Mowrer and ...
... Edward Thorndike maintained the reinforcement in the form of punishment or reward was necessary for the learning of voluntary behaviours to occur.

An experiment conducted by Edward C Tolman and C.H. Honzik on latent learning provided some of the first evidence that reinforcement is not necessary for learning to occur. They provided one of the finest and well known examples for latent learning. Latent learning often shows up in everyday life. Positive reinforcement causes one to perform for the first time a behaviour which has already been learned. Latent learning is given the name from the word latent which means “existing but previously unknown”. Latent learning on the other hand have disproved some of the basic assumptions of the early theories of operant conditioning.

Learning that is not demonstrated by behaviour at the time it is held to take place but that is inferred to exist based on a greater than expected number of favourable or desired responses at a later time when reinforcement is given is known as Latent learning. It is a learning that is not the result of determined effort and is not evident at the time it occurs, but remains latent until a need for it arises. A famous quotation by Elizabeth Bishop on latent learning is stated as follows “I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world”.

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