ABSTRACT
In everyday language, “learning” refers to the acquisition of knowledge, but psychologists use the word in a subtly different sense. For psychologists, the acquisition of knowledge belongs to the field of memory, and the word learning is usually reserved for changes in behaviour resulting from experi ence. The word skill, on the other hand, has roughly the same meaning in psychology as in everyday usage, but something needs to be said about the distinction between cognitive, motor, and social skills, all of which are covered in this section. Social skills are simply those that are specifically required for effective social interaction. The distinction between cognitive and motor skills is not entirely clear but, roughly speaking, cognitive skills are defined negatively as skills that do not require bodily or perceptual-motor coordination to any significant degree, and motor skills are those that do.
