Functional Learning

Synonyms

Function learning; Probabilistic learning

Definition

Functional learning is the learning of continuous functional mappings relating stimulus and response continua. Through functional learning, an organism (human or animal) acquires a judgment rule for correctly assigning each stimulus value encountered in a certain domain to one and only one response value. Examples of such rules commonly expressed by people in daily life are “the better the product, the higher its price” and “the higher the temperature, the faster the cooking.”

Theoretical Background

Most laws in the environment (e.g., physics laws, biology laws) may be expressed in terms of functional relations between events. People’s ability to detect and learn these continuous relations, and not just the associations between pairs of events, has certainly strong adaptive value.

Associative learning typically takes place when a reduced set of stimuli is used. In many experimental studies, few associations are considered,...