Short answers, pulled from the story.
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behavior, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, other animals, and some machines, and there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants.
Human learning begins at birth and may even start before birth, continuing until death through ongoing interactions between people and their environment. Habituation has been observed as early as 32 weeks into gestation, indicating the central nervous system is primed for learning very early.
In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with a reflex-eliciting stimulus until it elicits a response on its own, as in Ivan Pavlov's dogs salivating to a bell. Operant conditioning instead shapes behavior that requires conscious thought through reward or punishment delivered at a specific moment.
Habituation is a form of non-associative learning in which a response to a repeated stimulus diminishes, such as song birds reacting less and less to a stuffed owl. It has been shown in essentially every species of animal, as well as the plant Mimosa pudica and the protozoan Stentor coeruleus.
The five types of play are sensorimotor play, roleplay, rule-based play, construction play, and movement play. These types often intersect, and all of them generate thinking and problem-solving skills in children.
Monica Gagliano, an Australian professor of evolutionary ecology, ran a classical conditioning test on garden pea seedlings in Y-shaped tubes, pairing light with a fan. Most seedlings later grew toward the arm where light had been predicted by the fan's position the previous day, which she argued was evidence of associative learning.
Benjamin Bloom suggested three domains of learning: cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. These domains are not mutually exclusive, as shown in chess where a player learns the rules, learns to handle the pieces, and may come to love the game.