There is a whole field in cognitive psychology, cognitive learning theory, devoted to this topic. One element of learning theory that may be of interest to HN readers is their notion of a "schema" (not an RDBMS schema). Schemas are the networked data structures in the brain (based ultimately on the underlying physical brain structure--neurons, regions, etc.) There is some interesting work in how schemas are acquired, primarily through imitation and repetition (which is what you would expect when training a neural network).