Observing 'Human Life' Trajectories

Learning approaches were the methodological backbone of psychology for half a century (1920s to 1960s). Anything observable, similar to what is found in the other sciences, was, and is still oftentimes, seen as more scientific. Today, I'm going to make a humble attempt at understanding how the study of learning has evolved over time, particularly after the advent of cognitive neuroscience and due to a better understanding of human motivation in the past 50 years. I'll put this in form of a friendly response to Dr. Gordon Bower's APS 2016 talk in which he tried to reconcile Classical Learning theories. The idea is to help a general audience see how the same scientific questions evolve in fascinating ways due to the unintended influence of other relevant theories and scientific ideas developing alongside.

Learning, in the study of psychology, is behavior acquired over time, either by associating the occurrence of a naturally expected and newly introduced reminder in a predictable way (classical conditioning) or by the encouragement/discouragement of expressed behaviors (operant conditioning). For example, in Dr. Ivan Pavlov's original experiments, the natural expectation was the dog anticipating food, and the learned response was anticipating food at the sound of a bell, after learning had occurred. As these theories developed further, researchers became interested in how the specificity of future behavior could be better predicted. The interest in shaping behavior as closely as possible using psychological principles became a common endeavor. Inevitably, researchers at this time couldn't have avoided the person-based factors which make behavior more meaningful and hence better sustained. In animal models, which is what dominated the study of learning for quite a while, it was assuring to see a more direct influence of learning introduced by the experimenter. However, in human beings something else existed that wasn't always in the experimenter's control — human motivation influenced by higher cognitive capacities. Human beings weren't cut out for simply pecking, inspecting, and responding in a box like pigeons and behavior was sometimes a result of ideological goals or tied to identity related expressions.

1. In human beings, a delayed or negative response to rewards or typically reliable associations may mean:

   1. already decided choices in the reward domain or what is an already stronger association/learned lesson for the person,

   2. the reward or association not holding value to the person as it usually does to most people,

   3. mistrust regarding the reward or association based on situational cues and past experiences,

   4. variability in what is novel or familiar to individuals due to personality factors, and

   5. other higher motivational goals having greater value and the new association or reward possibly conflicting with these values.

   
   

2. Association, rewards and punishments could have varied definitions based on whatever mattered to the person intrinsically, in the long run or at the time. See the Self-Determination Theory for more. Some of this may even be encouraged by group-based or developmental goals. For instance, when people go on hunger strikes or fast, live or die for ideological or religious reasons, they surpass evolutionarily expected drives.

   
   

3. The perfect pristine experimental conditions in which a lot of predictability in learning was studied, mainly in smaller animals, didn't always mimic what humans come across each day. This explains why findings from research based on animal models ends up being better replicated in humans for some mechanisms but not all. In more affective/emotion based and higher knowledge-based domains, learning tends to vary more individually.

   
   

4. Lastly, memory, which is persistent learning over time, makes accessibility of information different in varying personalities, age-ranges, and people with different recovery and relapse time-based trajectories due to usual or major life events.

What we observe and change in highly predictable ways, matters. No question. However, the inner human experience was appreciated more systematically and scientifically only after the 1970s. Person X Situation interactions were better understood over time leading to a consensus about particular experiences being more contingent on person factors and some more on situation. Finally, by the 1980s, personality and emotion weren't 'noise' anymore. In the past few decades, this previous noise has become more like music which is often taken in to account to continue to shape learning in ways that shows when we all are similar to each other and when we may also have a more individualized learning trajectory. Today, we can answer this latter issue with better confidence due to the advent of advanced research tools and methodologies in emotion, personality, cognitive neuroscience, and epigenetics.

I'm not sure what Dr. Bower would have said to the above ideas. However, I did have the chance to talk with him in 2007 during a visit to Stanford University in which after an enthusiastic conversation on emotion he asked me to find the emotion guy in the room. Later, a student told me who he was and that he wasn't just a usual existence as masked by him in an unpresuming way to encourage conversation with a new student of psychology.