Invitation to Psychology

Chapter 9 Learning and Conditioning 331

and finds her way to Fourth and Fiddle Streets

using a route she has never used before (without

GPS!). A little boy observes a parent setting the

table or tightening a screw but does not act on this

learning for years; then he finds he knows how to

do these things.

Latent learning raises questions about what,

exactly, is learned during operant learning. In the

Tolman and Honzik study, the rats that did not

get any food until the 11th day seemed to have

acquired a mental representation of the maze.

They had been learning the whole time; they

simply had no reason to act on that learning un-

til they began to find food. Similarly, the driver

taking a new route can do so because she already

knows how the city is laid out. What seems to

be acquired in latent learning, therefore, is not a

specific response, but knowledge about responses

and their consequences. We learn how the world

is organized, which paths lead to which places, and

which actions can produce which payoffs. This

knowledge permits us to be creative and flexible in

reaching our goals.

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Social-Cognitive Learning

Theories

During the 1960s and 1970s, many learning theo-

rists concluded that human behavior could not

be understood without taking into account the

You are about to learn...

• how you can learn something without any
obvious reinforcement.

• why two people can learn different lessons from
exactly the same experience.

• how we often learn not by doing but by
watching.

Learning and the

Mind LO 9.16

For half a century, most American learning theo-
ries held that learning could be explained by speci-
fying the behavioral “ABCs”: antecedents (events
preceding behavior), behaviors, and consequences.
Behaviorists liked to compare the mind to an en-
gineer’s hypothetical “black box,” a device whose
workings must be inferred because they cannot be
observed directly. To them, the box contained irrel-
evant wiring; it was enough to know that pushing a
button on the box would produce a predictable re-
sponse. But even as early as the 1930s, a few behav-
iorists could not resist peeking into that black box.

Latent Learning

Behaviorist Edward Tolman (1938) committed
virtual heresy at the time by noting that his rats,
when pausing at turning points in a maze, seemed
to be deciding which way to go. Moreover, the
animals sometimes seemed to be learning even
without any reinforcement. What, he wondered,
was going on in their little rat brains that might
account for this puzzle?
In a classic experiment, Tolman and C. H.
Honzik (1930) placed three groups of rats in
mazes and observed their behavior daily for more
than two weeks. The rats in Group 1 always found
food at the end of the maze and quickly learned to
find it without going down blind alleys. The rats
in Group 2 never found food and, as you would
expect, they followed no particular route. Group
3 was the interesting group. These rats found no
food for 10 days and seemed to wander aimlessly,
but on the 11th day they received food, and then
they quickly learned to run to the end of the maze.
By the following day, they were doing as well as
Group 1, which had been rewarded from the be-
ginning (see Figure 9.8).
Group 3 had demonstrated latent learning,
learning that is not immediately expressed in per-
formance. A great deal of human learning also re-
mains latent until circumstances allow or require
it to be expressed. A driver gets out of a traffic jam

latent learning A form

of learning that is not

immediately expressed

in an overt response; it

occurs without obvious

reinforcement.

Never

reinforced

Reinforced

after day 10

Always

reinforced

0

246810 12 14 16 18 20

4

8

12

16

20

24

28

32

Days

Average errors x 3

Learning becomes

evident

FigURE 9.8 Latent Learning

In a classic experiment, rats that always found food in a

maze made fewer and fewer errors in reaching the food

(blue curve). In contrast, rats that received no food

showed little improvement (gold curve). But rats that got

no food for 10 days and then found food on the 11th

day showed rapid improvement from then on (red curve).

This result suggests that learning involves cognitive

changes that can occur in the absence of reinforcement

and that may not be acted on until a reinforcer becomes

available (Tolman & Honzik, 1930).