Models of Human Learning

The problem with human learning, is that so much that we learn is in terms of what we already know. This makes obvious sense. For example, we learn that Paris is the capital of France, but could not really learn this if we did not have some previous idea of what a capital city was, or a country. This, so called learning of facts, is known by psychologists as "declarative learning" to distinguish it from "procedural learning", a distinction made by amongst others the American Cognitive Psychologist, John Anderson.

Anderson built a large model of human learning, memory and problem solving known as ACT (Adaptive Character of Thought), and it has had many different versions. But, he models the way we improve our learning, and do tasks faster, namely how the things we know become proceduralised. For example, when you first learn someone's telephone number, you dial it very deliberatively, one digit at a time. But with practice, this gets faster, until the skill is completely automatic (automatized is the technical term), and then when you think of the name, you can immediately recall the number and dial it.

Interestingly, this is what Freud would have called it becoming unconscious. Indeed, the unconscious is essential to us as human beings. We could not possibly do all the things we do if every thing had to be done under conscious deliberation. Of course, for Daniel Dennett and other philosophers of consciousness, there is no strict distinction between conscious and unconscious. Rather, there is a continuum between conscious and unconscious experience.

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