Topic
Learning research, explained
12 open-access learning studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Do we form habits from repetition or just our last action?
Habitual actions are driven by remembering our very last action in a situation, rather than the total number of times we have practiced it.
- Do food cues trigger actions more in obese than healthy-weight people?
Obese individuals are biased toward actions that earn high-calorie foods when triggered by cues, whereas healthy-weight individuals respond similarly to both high- and low-calorie cues.
- How do learning progress and novelty drive human curiosity?
People decide to stop exploring a task when they stop learning from it, and they choose their next task based on both how much they expect to learn and how new it is.
- How does stress affect how we learn about safety and danger?
High levels of persistent tension and stress, rather than general anxiety, impair a person's ability to tell the difference between safe and dangerous situations when things are ambiguous.
- Does childhood stress make us more prone to rigid habits?
Adults with a history of early-life stress are more likely to fall into hard-to-break habits to avoid unpleasant outcomes.
- Do well-connected words help us learn new associations?
Words with many connections in our mental lexicon make it easier to form and remember new associations.
- Does Believing You Can't Cope Impair Fear Learning?
People who were led to believe they cope poorly with stress struggled to distinguish between safe and dangerous cues during a subsequent fear-learning task.
- Does personality affect how we learn to stop expecting rewards?
People with higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism are less successful at learning when a stimulus signals that an expected reward will be withheld.
- Does Praising Performance Relative to Others Help Motor Learning?
Telling people they performed better than average does not improve how well they learn a hidden physical sequence compared to giving no feedback.
- How Motivation Impacts Teenagers' Learning
Highly motivated adolescents struggle to learn from their mistakes when high rewards or punishments are on the line.
- Does classical conditioning reliably create a placebo effect for pain?
Using a classical conditioning procedure where pill intake was paired with covertly reduced cold pain did not lead to a lasting placebo effect when the full pain stimulus returned.
- Do different learning types require separate mental processes?
Informing people about how often stimuli will appear together changes their expectations of future events, but does not change how much they like those stimuli.