Discrimination learning

In psychology, discrimination learning is the process by which animals or people learn to make different responses to different stimuli. It was a classic topic in the psychology of learning from the 1920s to the 1970s, and was particularly investigated within:

• comparative psychology, where a key issue was whether continuous or discontinuous learning processes were concerned in the acquisition of discriminations
• human cognitive psychology
• the experimental analysis of behaviour, where a key issue was whether discriminations could be trained without the necessity for the subject to make errors
• developmental psychology, where a key issue was the changes that occur in the process of discrimination as a function of age
• cross-cultural psychology, where a key issue was the role that the cultural appropriateness of the stimuli to be discriminated played in the rate of acquisition of effective discrimination
• mathematical psychology, where attempts were made to formalise the distinctions being drawn in other branches of psychology.