Learning Behavior Psychologists have preformed many studies and proposed many theories regarding learning. Learning can be defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior that is due to past experience. John B. Watson was an early psychologist that didn't agree with many other psychologist's ideas about learning only relating to consciousness and thought processes. As the founder of behaviorism, Watson studied learning in a behavioral perspective, an approach that emphasizes the relationship between outwardly observable behaviors and environmental events, rather than mental processes. Classical conditioning is a process of learning associations between s