In psychology, discrimination learning is the process by which animals or people learn to respond differently to different stimuli. It was a classic topic in the psychology of learning from the 1920s to the 1970s, and was particularly investigated within:
While interest in the learning of discriminations has continued in all those fields, from about 1980 onwards the phrase "discrimination learning" was used less often as the main description either of individual studies or of a field of investigation. Instead, investigations of the learning of discriminations have tended to be described in other terms such as pattern recognition or concept discrimination. This change partly reflects the increasing diversity of studies of discrimination, and partly the general expansion of the topic of cognition within psychology, so that learning is not now the central organizing topic that it was in the mid-20th century.