從經驗中學習-Pavlov的古典制約
Learning by examples

Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell.
Pavlov 透過訓練使狗聽到鈴聲就會反射性地流口水。

This outpost is a neutral area between two rival countries.
這個據點是兩個對立國家的中立地帶。

The nutrient in the soil acts as a stimulus to growth.
土壤裡的養分扮演著刺激作物生長的角色。

Parents need to teach children the intrinsic value of good behavior.
父母應教導孩童良好行為的本質意義。

The thought of all that delicious food made me salivate.
想到各種美食不禁讓我垂涎三尺。

I have only a vague notion of what he does for a living.
我對於他以何為生只有個模糊的概念。

These are examples of Operant conditioning and show the power of parents in shaping the personality of the child.
這些是古典制約的範例中，父母在小孩人格形成過程中影響力道的展現。

The doctor asked the patient to strip.
醫生請病患脫去衣物。

His latest album release is a compilation of all the songs written by him.
他最新的專輯收錄了所有他自己寫的歌曲。

Some money was taken from my desk yesterday. I think I know who the culprit is.
昨天我在桌上放的錢被拿走了，我大概知道是誰做的。

Learning by examples

Learning Theory is rooted in the work of Ivan Pavlov, the famous scientist who discovered and documented the principles governing how animals (humans included) learn in the 1900s. Two basic kinds of learning or conditioning occur, one of which is famously known as the classical conditioning. Classical conditioning happens when an animal learns to associate a neutral stimulus (signal) with a stimulus that has intrinsic meaning based on how closely in time the two stimuli are presented. The classic example of classical conditioning is a dog’s ability to associate the sound of a bell (something that originally has no meaning to the dog) with the presentation of food (something that has a lot of meaning to the dog) a few moments later.

Dogs are able to learn the association between bell and food, and will salivate immediately after hearing the bell once this connection has been made. Years of learning research have led to the creation of a highly precise learning theory that can be used to understand and predict how and under what circumstances most any animal will learn, including human beings, and eventually help people figure out how to change their behaviours.

Role models are a popular notion for guiding child development, but in recent years very interesting research has been done on learning by examples in other animals. If the subject of animal learning is taught very much in terms of classical or operant conditioning, it places too much emphasis on how we allow animals to learn but not enough on how they are equipped to learn. To teach a course of mine, I have been dipping profitably into a very interesting and accessible compilation of papers on social learning in mammals, including chimps and human children, edited by Heyes and Galef (1996).

The research reported in one paper started with a school field trip to Israel to a pine forest where many pine cones were discovered, stripped to the central core. So the investigation started with no weighty theoretical intent, but was directed at finding out what was eating the nutritious pine seeds and how they managed to get them out of the cones. The culprit proved to be the versatile and athletic black rat (Rattus rattus) and the technique was to bite each cone scale off at its base, in sequence from base to top following the spiral growth pattern of the cone.

Urban black rats were found to lack the skill and were unable to learn it even if housed with experienced cone strippers. However, infants of urban mothers cross-fostered by stripper mothers acquired the skill, whereas infants of stripper mothers fostered by an urban mother could not. Clearly the skill had to be learned from the mother. Further elegant experiments showed that naive adults could develop the skill if they were provided with cones from which the first complete spiral of scales had been removed; rather like our new photocopier…