1. A Little History Psychology 3306

2. Dead White guys are not all bad As is the case with all science, the first investigations into learning were done by philosophers Aristotle – Contiguity (both spatial and temporal) – Similarity – contrast

3. Empiricism Then the Romans ruled the known world Then the barbarians came Yadda yadda yadda Then along cam the British Empiricists Believed that knowledge was all based on experience Hobbes and Lock are probably the best examples Locke ’ s blank paper or ‘ tabula rasa ’

4. The Nativists were their rivals Them being the Empiricists Kant and Descartes Descartes thought of the mind and the body as separate things Kant believed that we were born with natural concepts like space and time

5. Rules of Association The empiricists came out with a set of rules about how different things were associated Sesnations and ideas Simple sensations -> simple ideas Simple ideas come to be associated through contiguity into concepts

6. More rules Concepts of two simple ideas are called complex ideas Two complex ideas become duplex ideas Whatever…. But seriously, some of these ‘ rules ’ are not that far off from those that we think of in modern learning theory and indeed concept formation

7. Thomas Brown ’ s Secondary Principles of Association Length of time ‘ liveliness ’ Frequency of pairings Recency of pairings Freedom from other pairings ‘ Constitutional ’ differences

8. Brown and his principles Emotional state Health Prior habits Frankly, this is amazing. This list is darned close to the kind of things we talk about today

9. Ebbinghaus Well, these were all great ideas, but had not been tested. Cue Hermann Ebbinghaus Strangely, both the behaviourists and the cognitive types claim him as their own Nonsense syllables

10. Ebbinghaus Studied himself Found savings Repetition was key Classic fogetting curve Contiguity Reversal was detrimental, so it was not just contiguity but also contingency

11. ‘ Modern ’ ideas Eventually the ball was picked up by Skinner, Thorndike, Watson et al We owe a great deal of our modern ideas about learning to the ideas of the British associationists and later, Ebbinghaus.