Learning is acquiring new, or modifying existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.
Three domains of learning have been proposed by Benjamin Bloom, an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery-learning :
There are also numerous types of learning. Wikipedia lists 17 different types with several subtypes. More types are proposed by other sources.
The adaptation of neurons in the brain during the learning process is explained by the
Hebbian theory, a scientific theory in neurobiology. Introduced by Donald O. Hebb in 1949, it is also called Hebb’s rule, Hebb’s postulate, or cell assembly theory. Donald O. Hebb was a Canadian psychologist who sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks.