Study Habits for Connectionist Minds

When it comes to learning and in particular, our study habits, we tend to overlook the importance of firstly understanding how the brain and its mental processes function in order to work as efficiently as possible while achieving the best results. For us to become masters of our learning, and therefore our grades, we must first comprehend the mechanics of our mind. Connectionism has dominated the theoretical study of learning for the last 20 years and provides an explanation of our mental phenomena, including how we learn, that could aid your studies dramatically.

Edward Thorndike’s Connectionism Theory is built on the foundation that learning is the result of associations forming between stimuli and responses. These associations or “habits” become strengthened or weakened by the nature and frequency of the stimulus-response pairings. Mental phenomena is attributed to synaptic and neural activity whereby information is processed through patterns of activation spreading. This means that when information enters your brain, neurons begin to activate, forming a specific pattern than produces a specific output, forming networks between neurons.

To understand this, let’s look at a simple example. Imagine a person tells you to define the concept of a kettle. When you hear the word, the set of neurons associated with it activate automatically in your brain. The activation of this group of neurons spreads to others it’s connected to. This may include neural patterns related to the words tea, coffee, or boil, leading you to define a kettle as “a device that boils water to make tea and coffee.”

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Thorndike outlined that learning has taken place when a strong connection between stimulus and response is formed and he came up with three primary laws for this:

Law of Effect

The law of effect emphasises that habit formation is controlled by rewards. A connection between a stimulus and response is strengthened when the consequence is positive and weakened when the consequences negative.

Law of Exercise

The law of exercise outlines that the more a stimulus-response bond is practiced, the stronger it will become.

Law of Readiness

The law of readiness states that the more readiness the learner has to respond to the stimulus, the stronger the bond will be between them.

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Thorndik also stated that Connectionism has four key principles based off these laws:

1. Learning requires both practice and rewards (law of effect/exercise)
2. Stimulus and response associations can be linked if they belong to the same "action sequence” (law of readiness)
3. The transfer of knowledge occurs because of previously encountered situations
4. Intelligence is determined by the number of connections learned

Memory is created by modifying the strength of the connections between neural units. The patterns of activation that are formed during processing are not then stored in the system as memories. Instead, they are thought of as leaving a trace in the network through the alterations they produce in the strength of the connections. These alterations can then allow the pattern to be reconstructed in the future as a form of memory.

Learning the meaning of a new word, for example, does not involve concept learning at all, but simply involves learning to associate the word with internal knowledge that already exists in our minds. So anything that a network can represent after learning, must have been possible to represent before learning. This also applies to all other knowledge in your studies. By associating what you re trying to learn or memorise with information that already exists in your mind, you will find it easier to remember this information and recall it at a later time than if you are just trying to remember the concept on its own.