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Psychology 255
ly valid; thus in sensori-motor learning the r61e of certain ‘forms’ of organization
is often observed, the pregnancy of which depends on the stages of development
(e.g., a child of three learning to ride a tricycle can make a semi-rotational
pendulum-like movement with his legs before he can manage the full circle).
As to the logic of learning, with which wasconcerned the afore-mentioned work
by Apostel Matalon has been ableto show that even in stochastic learning choice
was dependent not just on the observed results, but also on the organization
of the successive actions of the subjects, with the strategies therefore implying
a logic dependent in each case on the operational level of the subject.
Of course, such interpretations are thus taking a constructivist direction, since
there is a constant elaboration of new and structuralist co-ordinations, and since
the co-ordinations take the form of an operative logic. It is interesting to find
out at what cost a traditional theory of learning can be reconciled with these
new trends. A disciple of Hull, D. Berlyne, has shown this in an interesting
essay, after proving himself that the learning of an ordered sequence presupposes
a ‘recording device’, in other words a prior ordering structure, which is entirely
in accordance with previous interpretations. His argument is that in order to
account for operative structures in the sense just mentioned it is necessary to
introduce the following three factors, of which the last two considerably modify
Hull’s conceptualization: I) stimulus-response generalizations foreseen but
not used by Hull; z) transforming responses as well as response patterns, which
are equivalent to our ‘operations’; and 3) internal reinforcement taking the form
of coherence, non-contradiction or surprise factors, etc., which amounts to notions
of logical equilibration.
III. The problems of learning are common ground both to biology and psychology,
and there is nothing in the intervention of a logic of learning that is contrary
to the spirit of biology if this logic is conceived in terms of the general coordination
of actions, therefore of self-regulation and self-correction, before
giving rise to the mental and reflexive interiorization constituting what is
commonly called natural logic.
However, learning touches on another question of common interest to biologists
and psychologists, which is memory or the retention of what has been
‘learnt’. Biologists speak of ‘memory’ in a very wide sense, which can go back,
for example, to the facts of immunity. When a bacterium attacked by an anti-
gen produces an antibody that immunizes: it, either it involves a genetic varia-
tion with selection, etc., and we do not speak of memory, or else it involves ac-
quired reactions (by a kind of moulding in the structure of the antigen), in
which case their retention would be called ‘memory’.
At the present stage of research, we have to distinguish between three types
of memory or, more precisely, three different meanings attributed to the term
memory, one of the essential problems then being the question of how they are
related. I) Firstly, there is what we shall call ‘memory as meant by the biologist’,
i.e., the retention during an individuai’s lifetime of everything that is acquired at
the behavioural level (conditioning, habits, intelligence, etc.). 2) Secondly, there
is memory linked solely to behaviour, but which affects as much the retention