Learning

This term covers broadly the acquiring of knowledge, abilities and habits, in fact all that may be considered a person's experience. Basically, obligatory learning is the acquisition of skills necessary to every individual and mainly takes place by imprinting; facultative learning refers to the particular changes in behaviour due to the specific experiences of an individual and occurs mainly through habituation and imitation. Although learning is usually defined as adapting to specific conditions, much interest has been focused on the transferring of what is learned under one set of conditions to situations with radically different conditions, on latent learning and on the formation of internal controls on behaviour. Learning is an open-ended process; working on partial information, there is a process of experimentation, learning by doing, under the guidance of higher modes. This yields a sense of direction for continuing the process rather than a finalized structure.