Today, another brief history lesson: Edward Thorndike, old-school (very: 1874 – 1949) learning and memory researcher.

From wikipedia:

Thorndike specified three conditions that maximizes learning:

• The law of effect stated that the likely recurrence of a response is generally governed by its consequence or effect generally in the form of reward or punishment.
• The law of recency stated that the most recent response is likely to govern the recurrence.
• The law of exercise stated that stimulus-response associations are strengthened through repetition.

The second two are essentially statistical — recency and repetition are very good predictors of future occurrence (this is the core of John Anderson’s Rational Analysis model of memory).  The first is the essence of reinforcement learning.  All are likely key components of the basal ganglia skill/habit learning system.

Historically speaking, there’s probably an interesting thread to draw from this type of thinking to behaviorism and then to the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and to the present.  I’ll save that for another day and leave this as another old school researcher we can find some chance to give a little intellectual credit to.