Page 52 - BOAF Journal 1 2012:2707

Behavioral Optometry BOAF Volume1 Number1 2012
one event always follows another or what we need to do get a desired result. Learning through condi- tioning enables us to profit from experience. We can be conditioned unconsciously and we can also condition others without being aware of what we are doing. For example, a parent who gives lots of attention to a child when he or she is naughty but ignores him or her when good unwittingly teaches the child to be naughty to gain attention. Of course we can imitate an action with precision, honing a skill by repeatedly comparing it with the actions of others. This starts at an early age with simple ges- tures, such as holding up a toy phone as if to lis- ten. The imitation becomes gradually more com- plex. A child gently rocks a doll to sleep or even, by the age of 4, stands at a toy cooker and pre- tends to make dinner. Actually very young children spend hours miming the actions of adults in pre- tend play. We can say that we pick up conscious techniques for learning both through the teaching we receive and through practice. One of the first things we learn is that experiences and facts on which we focus attention are more likely to be re- tained than those we merely register in passing. For example, a passage from a book, like you're reading now, has a greater chance of being memo- rized if the reader blocks out everything else and concentrates solely on the meanings of the words. We find that it is also much easier to focus on something intrinsically interesting than on some- thing we find boring. So we can force ourselves to attend to more tedious items by creating mental links between them and subjects of greater per- sonal interest. A motorbike fanatic, for instance, might learn the kings and queens of Belgium by imagining them on different models of bike. Out learning strategies improve as our knowledge of where to look for information and what to ignore increases. In general we can say practice makes perfect. Actually repetition is the most effective way of learning skills "by heart".
Learning is one thing, but to memorize is an- other.
To be continued...
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