Individual differences are more than a gene × environment interaction: The role of learning.

Abstract

Individual differences in behavior are understood generally as arising from an interaction between genes and environment, omitting a crucial component. The literature on animal and human learning suggests the need to posit principles of learning to explain our differences. One of the challenges for the advancement of the field has been to establish how general principles of learning can explain the almost infinite variation in behavior. We present a case that: 1) individual differences in behavior emerge, in part, from principles of learning; 2) associations provide a descriptive mechanism for understanding the contribution of experience to behavior; 3) learning theories explain dissociable aspects of behavior. We use four examples from the field of learning to illustrate the importance of involving psychology, and associative theory in particular, in the analysis of individual differences, these are; i) fear learning, ii) behavior directed to cues for outcomes (i.e., sign-and goaltracking), iii) stimulus learning related to attention, and iv) human causal learning. Individual Differences 3A goal of research into learning is to characterize how behavior changes with experience within and across species. Thorndike's (1898) Law of Effect was an early attempt to characterize the effect of experience on behavior. In offering a general law of how experience contributes to behavior, Thorndike was also giving an account of how an individual becomes unique.The classic example of Thorndike's method involved cats and an apparatus known as a puzzle box (Thorndike, 1898). The box was a rudimentary cage with latches and gates to afford escape. The cats' dislike of confined space provided a natural motivation to engage in behaviors that might serendipitously lead to release. Thorndike observed that the cats made many false starts but eventually made a response that enabled escape. With repeated exposure to the box, latency to escape decreased. The Law of Effect stated that behaviors preceding any form of 'satisfaction' (e.g., escape) would be reinforced and made more likely on subsequent trials. However, rather than considering this principle as limiting an animal's flexibility to learn, the law only restricts the conditions for learning. Consider that outside the lab, different humans can successfully complete a motivated goal in different ways. They may behave differently but the same Law of Effect strengthens their behaviors.The goals of this paper are to present the case for the individual differences approach to learning theory. We will argue that (1) learning mediates the influence of genes and environment on behavior and (2) there is complexity, to be explored, within models of learning that can account for diversity in learning. Specifically, we suggest that while genes and environment may contribute to the development of differences in learning, that an individual's phenotype interacts with experience and the memories of experience to further cause individual differences. As such, the study of individual diff...

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