Learning - What is Learning?

Doctor Josh Dubnau describes learning as a change in an animal’s behavior in response to previous stimuli or experience.

The answer to the question of ‘what is learning’ depends a little bit on whether one wants a textbook definition or a more colloquial one. A textbook definition of what is learning might be something like a change in an animal’s behavior in response to previous stimuli. So, an animal experiences a stimulus or a set of stimuli, and then in the future when experiencing those or similar stimuli, the animal behaves differently because of past experience. And so learning is really impossible to measure in an animal, it’s inferred from a change in behavior of an animal.