Not only negative behaviours are acquired through observational learning. Young children saw a film of an adult wildly hitting a 5 feet tall inflatable punching toy called a bobo doll later the children were given an opportunity to play with the bobo doll themselves and they displayed the same kind of behaviour imitating the aggressive behaviour. Bandura and his colleagues demonstrated rather dramatically the ability of models to stimulate learning in what is now considered a classic experiment. Observational Learning: Learning through Imitation:Īnother form of cognitive learning is observational learning.Īccording to psychologist Albert Bandura and his colleagues, a major part of human learning consists of observational learning, which they defined as learning through observing the behaviour of another person called a model. In-spite of the inadequacies, we do develop cognitive maps through latent learning. They are imperfect versions of actual maps. Our cognitive maps are often riddled with errors. Using such a map, they are eventually able to take shortcuts as they develop a broad understanding of the area. As people become more familiar with an area they develop an overall concept of it which has been called an abstract cognitive map.
People too develop cognitive map of their surroundings based primarily on particular landmarks when they first encounter a new environment, their maps tend to rely on specific paths. The rats seemed to develop a cognitive maps of the maze, a mental representation of special locations and direction. To cognitive theorists, it seemed clear that the rewarded rats had learned the layout of the maze early in their explorations they first never displayed their talent learning until the reinforcement was offered. The previously unrewarded rats, who had earlier seemed to wander about aimlessly showed reductions in summing time and declines in error rates such that their performance almost immediately matched that of a group that had received rewards from the start. The results of their manipulation were dramatic. These rats learned to run quickly and directly to the food box making a few errors.Ī third group of rats started out in the same situation as the unrewarded rats but only for the first ten days on the eleventh day a critical experimental manipulation was instituted from that point on the rats in this group were given food for completing the maze. A second group, however, was always given food at the end of the maze. These rats made many errors and spent a relatively long time reaching the end of the maze. Once a day for seventeen days without ever receiving any reward. In one representative experiment a group of rats was allowed to wander around the maze.
In the studies, psychologists examine the behaviour of rats in a maze.
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