How Psychological Learning Paradigms Shaped and Constrained Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Current artificial intelligence systems struggle with systematic compositional reasoning: the capacity to recombine known components in novel configurations. This paper argues that the failure is architectural, not merely a matter of scale or training data, and that its origins lie in the psychological learning theories from which AI paradigms were derived. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, drawing on the systematicity debate in cognitive science and on the demonstration of Aizawa that neither connectionism nor classicism can make systematicity a structural consequence of the architecture, the paper establishes that the corrective techniques proliferating in modern AI, from chain-of-thought prompting to alignment through human feedback, function as auxiliary hypotheses that address symptoms without resolving the underlying architectural indifference to systematicity. Second, it traces the genealogy from psychological learning theory to AI methodology, showing that behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism each bequeathed a specific structural limitation to the AI paradigm it inspired: the exclusion of internal structure, the opacity of representation, and the absence of formal construction operators. A cross-cultural reappraisal of rote learning reveals a further underexploited pathway. Third, the paper introduces ReSynth, a trimodular conceptual framework that proposes the principled separation of reasoning, identity, and memory as a path toward architectures in which systematic behaviour is a structural consequence of design rather than a correction applied after the fact.