Learning and Human Abilities

One of the most fundamental of human activities is learning. It includes the development and modification of tendencies governing psychological functions. The scientific story of learning involves a wide scopes and encompasses varied view points. It can be studied from the developmental, interactive, associative and cognitive levels

Retention of what is learned is governed by varied factors contributing to efficiency. Among these factor include motivation, duration of practice, transfer of learning, knowledge of results, meaningfulness of materials, the use of devices, sense modalities, degrees of overlearning and active participation in the learning task.

Remembering and forgetting are form of behavior explained from different standpoints bu such theories as Passive Decay Thru Disuse, Systematic Distortion of Memory Traces, Interference Effect and Motivated Forgetting.

Thinking which utilizes symbolic representations of thing or events falls into two categories: 1) Associative (Undirected) thinking; and 2) Directed Thinking and includes such activities as autistic thinking, daydreaming, nightdreaming, imagination, reveries, problem-solving, reasoning, creativity and brainstorming.