Final answer:
Reinforcement is essential in strengthening the stimulus-response bond in associative learning, particularly through operant conditioning and positive reinforcement.
Step-by-step explanation:
Reinforcement is essential to effective learning because it strengthens the stimulus-response bond. This is fundamental to the process of associative learning, which involves forming connections between stimuli or events that occur together in the environment, as seen in classical and operant conditioning. Positive reinforcement, part of operant conditioning, is an effective way to teach a new behavior by adding a desirable stimulus to increase that behavior. Through shaping, one can reward successive approximations toward a target behavior, making the learning process more efficient.
For example, when a young child learns to put away toys as a result of being rewarded with a bedtime story, this is a practical application of reinforcement. Similarly, a student may learn to study for tests due to the positive outcome of achieving better grades. The phenomenon of stimulus discrimination is also linked to effective learning as it enables the learner to distinguish between stimuli that are associated with the desirable response from those that are not.