Information Processing and Memory

Beginning students must also cope with large classes. Some first-year classes may have enrollments of 100 or more. For this reason, instructors find it difficult to establish personal relationships with their students, who may consider the system too formal and impersonal. 

Learning is a lifelong, continuous process. We experience many kinds of learning at various times and in many ways. One of the simplest and most basic forms of learning is known as conditioning. Conditioning is the acquisition of fairly specific patterns of behavior in the presence of well-defined stimuli. 

Classical conditioning was discovered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who found that dogs could be trained to salivate at the sound of a bell rung a few seconds before the dogs were fed. The reaction (salivation), he found, could be transferred to another stimulus (the sound of the bell) that would not normally produce this reaction. 

Learning specialists recognize that human behavior may be strongly influenced by secondary reinforcers whose value is learned through association with other reinforcers. Money, for example, is a secondary reinforcer that, because of its association with food, clothing, and other primary reinforcers, is widely recognized as a powerful reward. 

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Cognitive Effiects. Along with the overt psychotic symptoms that characterize schizophrenia, deficits in cognitive function are commonly manifested by impairments in attention, information processing, and memory (14, 701-703). While antipsychotic drugs can ameliorate impaired attention and information processing, their effects on memory... 

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