Learning and Human Development

The Forty-second Maudsley Lecture, delivered before the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, 17th November, 1967

¹ Professor of Psychology, The University of Hull, Yorkshire

I have tried to show, in the first part of my lecture, the consequences which operate logically from acceptance of the truism that development is determined by the interaction of learning with congenital factors. This at once suggests that results of early experience which have anything more than merely transitory effects are likely by definition to exhibit the general phenomena of learning. In turn, the permanence of early learning will depend not only upon the age of the child and the duration and intensity of the experience, but more particularly upon its later reinforcement. Early learning will fade if not reinforced. At the outset I faulted this crude model and asked whether data from properly controlled studies would overthrow it. On the contrary, it seems to me that the data give moderate support to this notion, and cast doubt on some current views, which really imply an extreme environmentalism in relation to the age range 0 to 5 but not thereafter.

The formative years seem likely to be of much longer duration than some have thought, and it may well be that the relative stability of some human characteristics reflect environmental stability and continuity for the individual (Bloom, 1964). Even so, under conditions of relative environmental stability there is some degree of variation of psychological characteristics over time. This must, therefore, reflect either the influence of genetic and maturational factors, or else subtle, as opposed to gross, environmental effects (Sontag, Baker and Nelson, 1958), or an interaction of both. When larger alterations occur in the child's experiences, corresponding and larger changes occur in his personal characteristics.

The second part of my lecture related to transfer and categorization processes. I have tried to indicate that experimental method gives us a mode of attack in elucidating difficult problems, the solutions to which are only vaguely indicated by correlational studies. It has been shown that exposure to complex categorizing experiences facilitates categorizing different material and reveals transfer processes of far wider effect than the specific processes more commonly studied. Such effects have some persistence and do not easily extinguish, although doubtless they too would fade if not reinforced. It may be that our experiments have sampled the processes by which young children gain independence from the specific, and the means by which cognitive abilities are built up. Thinking is partly a matter of drills and skills (Ryle, 1953); our experiments indicate that complex drills create both some specific and some more general skills. Certainly the notion of complexity fits quite well studies on the effects of enriched versus impoverished environments, and this in turn ties up with the first part of my lecture. Moreover, two other streams of research coincidentally focus upon the importance of complex experiences. The first is associated with the name of Rosenzweig, and shows in animals significant changes in brain chemistry and morphology as a result of complex experience (Bennett, Diamond, Krech and Rosenzweig, 1964; Rosenzweig, Bennett and Diamond, 1967). The second, by Munsinger, Kessen and Kessen (1964) and Munsinger and Kessen (1966), indicates that young children show a preference for complex over simple stimuli.

Taken together, both subjects I have discussed have in common an emphasis upon change in human characteristics, the one in the long term during development, and the other in laboratory conditions which seek to simulate some of the problems of real-life cognitive experience. Now, change in human characteristics is perhaps a more attractive notion than the predestinationism built into theories ascribing crucial importance to the pre-school years. Crawshay-Williams (1947) has alerted us to the dangers of "comfortable concepts", and I have therefore tried to examine my theme very critically.

Most aspects of behaviour, to a greater or lesser extent, possess learned components, and it seems that for man long periods of enduring experience are needed before personality and cognitive structures are so developed and shaped by overlearning that they attain that relative inflexibility, stability and autonomy in the face of changing circumstances which are characteristic of the mature person. By the age of 30, remarked William James, man's personality is set hard as a plaster cast.

From the practical viewpoint, and as I have indicated, there already exist some careful studies which reveal that some children and young people can respond dramatically to dramatic environmental change, usually from impoverished to enriched environments. The United States is currently basing its major attempts in the prevention of mild mental retardation on such studies (Gray and Klaus, 1965). The Headstart Programme will, however, stand or fall not on what it achieves in the pre-school years, but on whether or not these diversions of development are subsequently reinforced.

Our major need now is to determine more precisely the factors that initiate, accentuate and maintain alteration in human characteristics, as well as to determine the ultimate limits of these effects and the causes of individual differences in responsiveness to change. For psychiatry and developmental psychology a formidable task lies ahead, but by now we have available sophisticated techniques and methodologies which may help to establish more fundamental principles than we yet possess.

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