Biofunctional learning and performance

The first generation of learning scientists were behavioral psychologists, who pioneered the field in the first half of the 20th Century. Today, behavioral learning theory continues to enjoy a strong following even though its mainstream position was taken up by the second generation of learning researchers, namely cognitive psychologists. During the cognitive era, interest in the scientific study of learning spread to engineering and computer science with an almost exclusive focus on knowledge acquisition as the symbolic internalization of soft representations. Learning beyond soft knowledge, qualitative learning, and learning as multiple-source organizing were left up to the third generation of learning scientists - namely, biofunctionalists - who crossed the threshold of the 21st Century in dim popularity, mainly because of their counterintuitive definition of learning as whole theme reorganization of the learner´s own intuitive knowledge base. This paper examines the three pioneering shifts in the science of learning with a focus on the nature of their landmark transitions.