II. Animals are welcome to the class: learning classes

To dogs by culture so refined,

The wised man is well inclined;

And e'en your favour he may earn,

Who from his tutor thus can learn.

Faust

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(Translated by Lord Francis Leveson Gower)

We start with depicting an integrative portrait of an intelligent animal with describing basic forms of learning. As we saw in Part I, our knowledge about animal intelligence has not ascended gradually to the discovery of top cognitive skills from investigation of simple forms of learning. At the beginning of 20-th Century two scientific schools that approached learning basing on insight (gestaltism) and on conditioning (behaviourism) had started almost simultaneously with their efforts to describe learning processes quantitatively and objectively. Recently new experimental means have been found for studying animal cognition. For example, intermediary languages elaborated for carrying on a dialog with several species including apes, dolphins and parrots, allowing asking animals directly what they think about this world in general and their trainers in particular. At the same time, both classical and operant conditioning are assumed as basic for many modern methods for studying animal ability for abstraction, categorisation and extraction rules. Discrimination learning based on principles of stimulus discrimination and stimulus generalisation is actively used by neurophysiologists as an effective tool for studying neurological mechanisms of memory.

As we know now, individual adaptive behaviour involves different kinds of learning together with innate behavioural patterns. For our relative comfort, we will consider a labelling system generally acceptable to ethologists and keeping with Thorpe’s (1963) classification of learning classes (see also: Wallace, 1979):

(1) Habituation

(2) Associative learning

(a) Classical conditioning (also called Type I, or the conditioned reflex)

(b) Operant conditioning (also called Type II, or instrumental conditioning)

(c) Trial and error

(d) Gestalt perception

(e) Learning sets

(3) Latent learning

(4) Insight learning

(5) Imitation

(6) Play

(7) Imprinting

Roughly keeping this classification, we will not adhere closely to it because our knowledge about learning has been changed since the late seventieth; besides, perhaps each researcher has some special feelings concerning the order and subordination of different kinds of learning. In particular, the so-called “ guided learning ”, which is not included in this scheme, will be considered in Part VII. Social Learning nowadays is considered an integrative class of learning and that includes “imitation” as a subordinate form of learning. This theme will be considered in Part VIII.

Besides it seems more naturally in the modern context to consider “Trial and Error” as a subset of instrumental and operant condition, and “Gestalt perception” as a subset of “Insight”. Such forms of learning as “Insight”, “Latent learning” and “Learning sets” as well as “Concept formation”, which does not figure in Thorpe’s classification concerning Cognitive Learning and Intelligence, will only be nominated in this Part chapter and analysed in details in Parts V and VI. In this Part we will concentrate on Habituation and Associative Learning and sketch other classes of learning, which require more cognitive explanations and will be considered in the next parts.

6. HABITUATION AND ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING