ABSTRACT
A distinction between early and later learning was made by D.O. Hebb in his The Organization of Behaviour (1949) against the background of the controversy then existing between those who thought of learning as a continuous process through which stimulus-response connections are built up and those who thought that there must be discontinuities where insight dawns or jumps of thought are made. It would not be profitable to go into that controversy here, since its terms of reference were very much the behaviourist psychology of the period. That there should be a difference, however, between the learning processes at the beginning of a child's life (or, for that matter, an animal's) and those that characteristically take place later is very much what we should expect. Hebb suggested that early learning was a slow, continuous business and on the whole concerned with generalities, while later learning was quick and often punctuated by jumps in which the learner leaps from one thing to another. As far as human learning is concerned we might expect there to be initially a slow building up of concepts in the course of a gradual process in which things are distinguished and sorted out. This might very well be characterised as a process of particularisation, so that what is first seen in general terms is gradually given specificity. I say 'might very well be characterised' since the actual course of learning may be very various, depending on the circumstances in which the learner finds himself, particularly the circumstances provided by other people. Nevertheless, one would expect things to be seen in terms of broad similarities first, so that to speak of the process as one of particularisation would not be an unfair description of its trend. Later learning will involve the use of concepts already acquired, and their extension and modification in the face of increasing experience. The similarities and distinctions perceived may then be of a quite different character from what was the case earlier, and the leaps of thought and insight more frequent. Hence learning would be expected to take place more quickly when it occurs. This seems to be a fair general picture of the situation.
