THEORIES OF LEARNING: Page 48

An interesting postscript for our purpose is that Thorndike considered his laws of learning applicable to animals as well as humans. At least one sleep-learner felt the same way—the man who taught his parakeet its huge vocabulary. Another school of thought about how we learn is that of conditioning. Its belief is that the nervous system is the basis of conditioning. This theory is a continuation of Ivan Pavlov's studies of the physiology of learning. Pavlov's experiments, with his celebrated dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, showed that conditioning can bring about reflexive responses to stimuli other than the originally effective ones. The conditioned reflex is explained as being the result of impulses traveling along the brain's neurons in chain fashion and creating a "reflex arc." John B. Watson espoused behaviorism (1925) and asserted that learning is a simple matter of stimulus and response. For example, fear is learned or unlearned. It is a simple matter of conditioning. E. B. Guthrie (1952) developed Bain's idea of contiguity. He held that: "A combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement." For him, response is divided into movement (motor and glanular phenomena) and act (class of movements expressed through results). He sees learning as action as the result of repetition. He finds that a combination of movement helps to bring about the response, and Guthrie writes, "Effective practice is conducted in the general situation in which we desire the future performance to be given/'