Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many intuitive notions of “learning” do not support thediverse kinds of learning across different situations andlearners. In this paper I offer a functional definition oflearning from a cognitive science perspective, which attemptsto account for the presence of learning in different physicalsubstrates. The definition is that a particular event should beconsidered a good example of “learning” to the degree towhich the following characteristics describe it: 1) a systemundergoes change to its informational state or processing 2)the change is for the purpose of more effective future action,3) the change is in response what the system experiences, and4) the system executes the change, rather than some outsideforce. Episodes are better examples of learning according tohow many of these characteristics they have. I discussbenefits and limitations of this characterization.