Learning Explained

The diagram to the left represents another way of illustrating the Affective Context Model, which explains how learning takes place.

As we experience the world our brains need some way of deciding what to encode and how to encode it, so as to retrieve it in a way which is useful. Our minds solve this problem by encoding information along with its affective context – that is, our affective response to what we experience. At an oversimplified level the mind is saying things like ‘If you have no reaction to this, it’s not worth storing.” and “The last time you felt like this, this is what happened.”

In order to work in this way, the hippocampus is instrumental in ‘tagging’ incoming information with affective context. Note that this is largely pre-programmed - there are certain things which we can guarantee will be memorable whoever is experiencing them - but also can be modified by our experience and acquired attributes. A student of architecture might be awed by a cathedral whilst someone else is bored, however both are likely to remember the fire that broke out.

Incoming information is stored and compared according to affective context: information with strong affective context will persist longer.  Hence our memories of life events tend to be for things with powerful emotional elements. When we are asked to recall things, our reconstruction is largely based on the affective elements: we may not remember a specific math lesson but we will use the affective components common to many episodes (and any especially strong elements) to construct a scene in which we are bored and worried about the upcoming test (for example). This phenomenon can be observed clearly in storytelling – i.e. in the way that we relate our experiences to others.

Affective encoding also governs our ability to compare information. For example we may say that a person is ‘chicken’ because these two things have common affective elements: both strike us as fearful and avoidant.

When describing the affective context model, the major obstacle to understanding it is our crude conception of ‘affective’ – we tend to interpret it to mean ‘emotional’ in the sense in which we understand emotions such as ‘happy/sad/funny’ and it seems odd therefore to suggest that learning is entirely based on these reactions. But this is analogous to describing vision as our perception of the colours red, green, blue. Whilst at one level this is true, it is misleading to imagine that vision is simply detection of patches of colour – it is far more sophisticated than that. Our affective reaction to stimuli is vast, complex and subtle - and almost entirely invisible to casual introspection. I do also appreciate that this explanation leaves much unanswered – for example precisely how different classes of information (visual, auditory etc are represented).

It is also possible to see how Affective Context underpins more familiar learning phenomena, such as Operant Conditioning. A rat’s behavior may be modified if it receives a food pellet in response to pressing a lever, but not if it receives a wooden pellet of the same shape and size. Why? We overlook the obvious: our behaviours are modified only by those things that are affectively significant to us.

There are clearly a great many practical implications of this way of understanding learning. One simple framing of the point might be ‘If something is significant to us it is remembered; if something is made significant to us it is remembered. If something is neither significant nor made significant it is not remembered.”

Over the years education has arrived at a range of ways of making things significant, in a largely hit-and-miss fashion. One common example is tests. Tests are deliberately emotionally-charged – there are affective consequences for success or failure. So by associating information with a test (‘Will this be on the test, sir?’) we can attach affective context to otherwise insignificant information. The theory also explains why your memories of school include those teachers who either cared about you, or bullied you - and are mostly comprised of things outside of the formal educational process.

After nearly a decade of explaining learning I find it’s a bit like explaining gravity: it is something that has been staring us in the face all along and which for that reason is overlooked and seems strange to explain.