Acquisition of behavioural knowledge

Competence is based on knowledge how to behave successfully in different situations. The independent acquisition of such knowledge requires an accumulation of experiences about what behaviour leads to what effects under which conditions. Learning of contingencies between behavioural acts and their effects is a traditional topic, however acquiring knowledge about the dependence of such contingencies on critical conditions has been seldom examined so far. fn this paper corresponding experiments are reported: subjects were presented varying initial situations where they had to select among simple behavioural acts in order to reach a given goal. The adaptation of behaviour to various conditionalized contingencies between acts and effects is examined It is shown that the mere existence of such contingencies is insufficient in order to accomplish the learning task. Rather, further factors have to be added in order to turn the learning process into the right direction. The influence of some of these factors is reported and the results are discussed with regard to theoretical implications as well as possible applications.