Creativity as Learning Process

Abstract

We use a rather simplified model of various levels of learning processes. This model is a comprehensive one in the sense that it tries to combine various theories about learning behavior, theories that often overaccentuate only one aspect of this behavior. A living organism is always responding to the stimuli that come from the environment and that have a certain influence on such an organism. It is not difficult to differentiate among various relationships, various patterns of stimuli plus the responses resulting from those stimuli. A certain stimulus, for instance the movement of an object towards the eye, produces a fixed type of response, in this case the shutting of the eye. Such a correlation between a certain stimulus and a certain response is called a reflex. All organisms possess an inventory of fixed reflexes. These are inborn, or, in other words, defined by heredity. The stimuli operate as signals that evoke a certain response from the organism. Those patterns of hereditary reflexes protect the organism against dangerous changes in its environment.