Consider emergency situations such as engine failure in a helicopter or an impending stall in an aeroplane. Audio and visual warnings and the aircraft's attitude are stimuli to which the pilot must very quickly react by carrying out the correct recovery manoeuvre (autorotation or upset prevention).
What is the most effective form of learning to allow the pilot to react quickly to the stimuli and carry out the correct manoeuvre?
Learning by insight/Cognitive learning means sudden grasping of the solution, a flash of understanding, without any process of trial and error.
Operant conditioning is a much more active version of classical conditioning (Pavlov's dogs) where we learn to do the correct procedure because of a particular stimuli.
- In this case, the learnt reaction to perform the correct recovery manoeuvre in response to a particular visual or audio cue (stall warner or engine failure in this example) is an example of operant conditioning.
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