The associative nature of human associative learning

摘要

The extent to which human learning should be thought of in terms of elementary, automatic versus controlled, cognitive processes is unresolved after nearly a century of often fierce debate. Mitchell et al. provide a persuasive review of evidence against automatic, unconscious links. Indeed, unconscious processes seem to play a negligible role in any form of learning, not just in Pavlovian conditioning. But a modern connectionist framework, in which "cognitive" phenomena are emergent properties, is likely to offer a fuller account of human learning than the propositional framework Mitchell et al. propose.