g higher motor units.

Human Learning

To compare human and animal learning, and notice in what ways the
human is superior, cannot but throw light on the whole problem of the
process of learning. It is obvious {312} that man learns more quickly
than the animals, that he acquires more numerous reactions, and a much
greater variety of reactions; but the important question is how he
does this, and how his learning process is superior.

We must first notice that all the forms of learning displayed by the
animal are present also in the human being. Negative adaptation is
important in human life, and the conditioned reflex is important, as
has already been suggested. Without negative adaptation, the adult
would be compelled to attend to everything that aroused the child's
curiosity, to shrink from everything that frightened the child, to
laugh at everything that amused the child. The conditioned reflex type
of learning accounts for a host of acquired likes and dislikes. Why
does the adult feel disgust at the mere sight of the garbage pail or
the mere name of cod liver oil? Because these inoffensive visual and
auditory stimuli have been associated, or paired, with odors and
tastes that naturally aroused disgust.

The signal experiment is duplicated thousands of times in the
education of every human being. He learns the meaning of signs and
slight indications; that is, he learns to recognize important facts by
aid of signs that are of themselves unimportant. We shall have much to
say on this matter in a later chapter on perception. Man learns signs
more readily than such an animal as the rat, in part because the human
being is naturally more responsive to visual and auditory stimuli. Yet
the human being often has trouble in learning to read the signs
aright. He assumes that a bright morning means good weather all day,
till, often disappointed, he learns to take account of less obvious
signs of the weather. Corrected for saying, "You and me did it", he
adopts the plan of always saying "you and I", but finds that this
quite unaccountably brings ridicule on him at times, so that gradually
he _may_ come to say the one or the {313} other according to obscure
signs furnished by the structure of the particular sentence. The
process of learning to respond to obscure signs seems to be about as
follows: something goes wrong, the individual is brought to a halt by
the bad results of his action, he then sees some element in the
situ