6.2: Operant Conditioning

Although researchers at more than 50 labs tried to replicate tific community concluded that McConnel may have, the wind went out of his scien after years of intense debate and mixed or negative results.

He'd become a likely brought up a host of alternative explanations for his results.
The victim of confirmation bias.
McConnell hadn't ruled out the possibility that his findings were attrib doors in 1971, and was never heard from again.

He hadn't excluded the possibility that the studies may have been flawed, as some scientists have speculated that light may have caused the planaria to contract.

The case in sci had acquired a classical y conditioned reaction to the light.
The truth will win out.

Think of a situation where you believe you have been conditioned.

You may have experienced a positive or negative emotional reaction to certain foods, a fear of an animal, or a photograph of someone.
In each case, describe how you believe you acquired the CR.

Using bird feed as a reward, a psychologist teaches a pigeon to distinguish paintings by Monet and Picasso.

The pigeon is enamored with art by the end of the training.

A trainer uses fish as a treat to teach a dolphin to jump out of the water and three other trainers use operant conditioning techniques to teach animals to perform.

In his first attempt at tennis, a frustrated 12-year-old hits his opponent's serve into the net 15 times.

He returned his opponent's serve successfully more than half the time after two hours of practice.

Whenever staff members pay attention to a hospitalized patient with a personality disorder, they will see features of his "alter" personality.

His alter personality disappears when they ignore him.

All are examples of operant conditioning.

The first comes from an actual study.
The behavior of the organisms is shaped by what comes after it, namely, reward.
The response to food, sex, attention, or avoiding something unpleasant is what the organism gets out of.

Target behavior is something.

Reward is voluntary.

It depends on behavior.

Asking out an attractive classmates is an operant, as is dropping a dollar into a soda machine.

If we're lucky, we'll get a refreshing drink and a hot date.

Operant conditioning and classical conditioning differ in three important ways.

In classical conditioning, the UCR is a reflexive and automatic response that doesn't require training.

The reward of the organisms is not dependent on what they do.

The dogs were given meat powder regardless of how much they salivated.
The animal's reward is contingent on what it does.
In the case of a dog, if the animal doesn't emit a response, it comes out empty-handed.

The responses of the organisms depend on the auto nomic nervous system.

The responses of the organisms depend on the muscles.
Classical conditioning involves changes in heart rate, breathing, perspiration, and other bodily systems, whereas operant conditioning involves changes in voluntary motor behavior.

This is not as complicated as it appears.

It means that if we're Figure 6.5 Thorndike's Puzzle Box.

The smell of a delicious hamburger or the sight of a Pull string opening a trap door are examples of how our complex behaviors reflect associations between stimuli and responses.

S-R theorists believe that almost everything we do is a result of the gradual build up of S-R bonds due to the law of effect.

Thorndike discovered the law of effect in a study of cats and puzzle boxes.

Thorndike put a hungry cat in a box and put a piece of fish outside.

When Thorndike put the cat in the puzzle box, it flailed around in a frantic attempt to escape.

Insight learning is when an individual discovers what will happen to the cat's behavior over time.

There was no point in time when the cat realized what it needed to do.

Thorndike said his cats were learning by trial and error.

S-R bonds are stamped into the organisms by reward.

Slowly, the time to a correct solution decreased.

Thorndike's discoveries on the law of effect paved the way for research on operant conditioning.

Skinner used electronic technology to kick it up a notch.

Skinner found Thorndike's setup unwieldy because the researcher had to build a small animal chamber to place the unhappy cat back into the puzzle box.

It was difficult to study the build up of associations in ongoing oper of conditioning to be administered ant behavior over hours, days, or weeks.

Skinner studied the operant behavior of rats, pigeons, and other ani mals and mapped out their responses to reward.

Skinner ran the risk of missing some important behaviors that the box wasn't designed to record by allowing a device to record behavior without any human observation.
His discoveries changed the landscape of psychology.

We need to make our way through psychological jargon to understand Skinner's research.

Reinforcement, punishment, and discriminative stimulation are three key concepts in Skinnerian psychology.

Figure 6.7 shows a rat in a box and an electronic device.

The Skinner box is a small chamber with a bar that the rat presses to get food and a light that signals when reward is forthcoming.

In the absence of the researcher, the electronic device graphs the rat's responses.

The forms of reinforcement increase the likelihood of the behavior.

An increase or strengthening of the response is the most frequent outcome.

Your authors know of a famous introductory psychology teacher who lectured from behind the podium.

The professor was spending most of his time away from the podium by the end of the removal of aStimulus that strengthens class.

The behavior that weakens the probability punishments can be either positive or negative.

If a punishment involves adminis of the behaviortering aStimulus, then it's positive; if it's taking away aStimulus, then it's negative.

Positive punishment usually involves administering a stimuli that the organisms want to avoid, such as a physical shock or a spanking, or an unpleasant social outcome, such as laughing at someone.

A favorite toy or article of clothing can be removed in negative punishment.

Reinforcement is different from punishment.

Discipline is punishment only if it decreases the probability of the behavior.

Skinner argued that certain actions that appear to be punishments are actually reinforcers.
He defined punishments in terms of their consequences.

Without knowing the effect on his behavior, there's no way to tell.

The mother is reinforcing his behavior if he kicks the wall more often.
The mother's admonishment weakens the probability of a response if his kicking stops after she scolded him.

Skinner and most of his followers argued against the use of punishment to change behavior.

They believed that reinforcement could be used to improve human behavior.

A child who is punished for throwing a tantrum won't learn how to deal with frustra.

It can interfere with future learning if punishment creates anxiety.

If it allows the situations in which they can and can't display forbidden behavior, people will become more negative reinforcement.

A child is in an unpleasant class.

A model for children's aggressive behavior may be provided by punishment from parents.

A child who is slapped by his parents may get the message.

Scientists disagree about the size of the correlation between the use of physical punishment by parents and aggressive behavior in children.

Murray Straus and his colleagues found that physical punishment was associated with more behavioral problems in children.
The study found that physically abused children are more likely to be aggressive in adulthood.
Researchers interpreted this finding to mean that early physical abuse causes aggression.

The operation of a cycle of vio lence is revealed by her findings.

Many children become abusers themselves when they become parents.
There were 88 studies of corporal punishment reviewed by Elizabeth Gershoff.

She found that a history of punishment in childhood is associated with an increased likelihood of becoming an abuse in adulthood.

Some scholars argue that childhood spanking should be banned.

These studies are correlational and don't demonstrate causality.

Other interpretations are possible.

Aggressive children may evoke physical abuse from their parents because they are difficult to control.

This hypothesis doesn't mean that physical abuse is acceptable, but it may help to explain why it happens.
It's possible that mild levels of punishment are effective, but that severe forms of punishment aren't.

Race and culture can affect the association between physical punishment and childhood behavior problems.

There is replicability of American families.

The issue requires further investigation because not all researchers have replicated these findings.

The reasons for this difference aren't clear, although children who are spanked in countries that are more culturally accepted may feel less stigmatized than children in countries that are culturally condemned.

According to most research, punishment works best when it's delivered promptly and consis tently.

Immediate punishment tends to be more effective than delayed punishment.

The dog may approach us for a petting if we snap our fingers at it.

The dog's finger snapping is a signal that it will receive reinforcement if it approaches us.
Skinner and his followers believed that we were aware of discriminative stimuli, but according to behaviorists, we are responding to them all the time.
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These terms apply to the operant condition that signals the presence of ing too.

Table 6.4 contains their definitions.

There are alternatives to reinforce a previously reinforced behavior.

She's learning to scream to get what she wants.

The screaming behavior will stop if parents stop placating the child by giving them toys.

The child is probably trying harder to get reinforced after withdrawing the reinforcer.
It's true that things sometimes need to get worse before they get better.

There is a less pronounced response to stimuli that is different from the original stimuli.

One group of investigators used food reinforcement to train pigeons to distinguish between paintings by Monet and Picasso.
The pigeons can tell the difference between two different stimuli.

The investigators found that their pigeons displayed the same generalization.

They distinguished paintings by impressionist artists whose styles were similar to Monet's, such as Renoir, from paintings by Cubist artists similar to Picasso.

If you're like most people, you'd answer (a), which seems to match our commonsense notions regarding the effects of reinforcement.

It seems logical to assume that the more consistent the reinforcement, the more consistent the behavior will be.

Skinner's principle of partial reinforcement shows that our intuitions about reinforcement are not always right.

According to the principle of partial reinforcing, when we reinforce a behavior only occasionally, it takes longer to extinguish it than when we rein it in.
If the dog learns that he'll be rewarded for catching the Frisbee only occasionally, he's more likely to try to catch it in the hopes of getting reinforcement.

If we want an animal to maintain a trick for a long time, we should only reinforce it occasionally.

Skinner said that partial rein behavior, which leads to slower forcement, leads to a greater resistance to extinction.
If the behavior had some people remain trapped for years in terrible, even abusive relationships, then extinction would be explained by this principle.
Sometimes relationship partners give intermittent reinforcement to their significant others, but sometimes they treat them well on rare occasions.
The pattern of partial reinforcement may keep people hooked on relationships that aren't working, and aren't likely to work in the long run.

We will discuss the four major ones here.

Remarkably, the effects of reinforcement schedules are the same for all species.
That is very impressive replicability.

There is consistency in administering reinforcement.

This finding makes sense.

There is a basis for administering reinforcement.

Interval schedules tend to have lower rates of responding than ratio schedules.

This finding makes sense.

If we want this dog to retain this dancing trick in the future, we should reinforce it more than if he gets a treat every 5 minutes.

A rat could be given a pellet after it presses the lever in a Skinner reinforcement 15 times.

A pigeon on a variable ratio schedule with an average ratio of pattern in which we provide 10 might receive a piece of bird feed after 6 pecks, then after 12 pecks, then after 1 peck, reinforcement after a specific number then after 21 pecks, with the

There is one place where we can be sure to find a virtual reality schedule, and that is a casino.

Based on the Figure 6.8 Four Major Reinforcement Schedules and Their Response Patterns, roulette wheels, slot machines, and other casino devices deliver cash rewards on an irregular basis.

The four major reinforcement schedules are fixed ratio, variable ratio, fixed interval and variable interval.

The fixed interval response pattern is referred to as the "scalloped" pattern.
The subject decreases the reinforced behavior immediately after receiving a reinforcer, then increases the behavior in anticipation of reinforcement as the time for reinforcement approaches.

Learning the gambler's responses.

Sometimes the gambler has to pull the arm of Schedules of Reinforcement the slot machine hundreds of times before getting any money at all.

A man blew nearly $127 million in two Las Vegas casinos over a year, ruining him financially.

He would stay up for 24 hours playing blackjack, losing five dollars at a time.

Pigeons are hooked on virtual reality schedules.

If this football player received a salary bonus for playing football, Skinner found that pigeons sometimes continue to peck on a disk for food after more than 150,000 nonreinforced re.
He would be on the process if they ground down their beaks in every touchdown he scored.
It's like desperate gamblers in a Las Vegas casino.

She needs to generate at least one clock during that one-week interval.

Fixed interval schedules are associated with a "scalloped" pattern of responding in the behaviors they yield.

The pattern shows that the animal waits for a time after receiving reinforcement and then increases its rate of responding just before the interval is up as it begins to anticipate reinforcement.

We could give a dog a treat for performing a trick on a variable interval schedule reinforcement for a response at an average interval of 8 minutes.

Some parenting practices rely on operant conditioning.

It's relevant to a lot of other things, from learning to master a video game to animal training.
We'll look at a few examples of operant conditioning in action.

If you've ever seen animals perform at a circus, zoo, or aquarium, you might wonder how they learned such elaborate routines.

Murphy and that come closer and closer to the Lupfer are examples of reinforcing behaviors that are not exactly the target behavior.

When we're learning the alphabet, each behavior in the chain becomes a cue for the next one, just as A becomes a cue for B, B for C, and so on.

Skinner taught pigeons to play a game called Ping-Pong, although they weren't Olympic-caliber table tennis players.

The earlier behaviors are affected by losing 10 roulette.

The gambler often concludes that Skinner began his training by reinforcing initial approximations in a row.
He's due to win because he's shaping and chaining complex animal.
The process of his or her odds behaviors can take days or weeks.
The payoff for winning on the 11th spin is not significant because we can train animals to lie more often.
All contemporary animal trainers rely on virtual reality schedules.

I'll get to that later.

Procrastination is one of the most frequent study problems college students report.

Procrastination may be harmful.

Our physical and psychological health may be affected by the stress it causes.
Early birds tend to perform better than procrastinators in class.

Although these findings are correlational, they suggest that putting things off isn't ideal.

Don't put off reading the rest of the paragraph, because we have a possible remedy.

David Premack discovered the best solution for Procrastination.
Premack found that we can reinforce a less frequently performed behavior with a more frequently performed behavior.
This principle works surprisingly well, even though it isn't a perfect rule.
This approach may help people stop putting off things they've long avoided, like going to the dentist.

You can treat yourself to an ice cream cone.

Operant conditioning can be applied to clinical settings.

In psychiatric hospitals, token economies are set up for reinforcing appropriate behaviors and extinguishing inappropriate ones.

You're at least somewhat superstitious if you've engaged in any of these actions.

You are in good company.

Many people are afraid of the number 13 because of the black cat.

Many people are afraid of the number 13 because it doesn't have a 13th floor.

In Paris, triskaid a certain pair of socks prior to a big test and got an A, we may develop ekaphobics who are going out to dinner with 12 other people can hire the false belief that these socks somehow contributed to our good per a quatorzieme 90 percent of college students engage in one or more superstitious exams, so we might wear that same pair of socks before our next.

We may become dependent on superstitions over time.
Some rituals, such as using a "lucky" pen or wearing searchers, have been found to rely on "lucky" objects, like a favorite charm, a "lucky" piece of jewelry.

In a famous operant conditioning tasks, 8 food-deprived pigeons were placed in a Skin Stoberock.

Other researchers have a ner box while delivering reinforcement, so it's dependent on their behavior.

It was surprising to see that some Athletes are notoriously superstitious.

Six of the pigeons had been acquired.
Making two or three turns on the extent to which the outcomes are due to chance is a remarkably strange and varied behavior.

You may have observed similar behaviors in pigeons that are more likely to produce enduring behav ple are feeding in city parks than are continuous reinforcement schedules.

In basebal, hitting circles in anticipation of reinforcement.
According to Skinner, his pigeons is less under players' control than is fielding, and even the best hit had developed superstitious behavior: actions linked to reinforcement by ters succeed only about 3 out of 10 times.
Out of 10 attempts, there's no association ers that succeed.
Hit is controled between superstitious behavior and reinforcement, but fielding is controled by acts as though there is.
The behavior of the pigeon was close to a reinforcement schedule.
As we might be performing immediately prior to being reinforced, basebal players have more hitting-related superstitions, like drawing a favorite symbol in the sand in the batter's box.

Studies have not replicated these findings in pigeons.

Many superstitions are spread by word-of-mouth and Simmelhag.
If our mother tells us that black superstitions develop in the fashion Skinner described, we may become wary of cats.
Operant conditioning plays an important role if we were wearing superstitions.

As an advanced graduate student, the first author of your text worked in a psychi increases the target behavior atric hospital unit consisting of children with serious behavior problems, including yelling and cursing.

One target behavior was being nice to staff members.

Stressful life events increase superstitions.

He could trade in Inter Fiction for something he wanted, like ice cream or a movie.

When a child was rude to a staff member, he was punished with a loss of points.

According to research, token economies can be used to improve behavior in hospitals, group homes, and juvenile detention units.

The behaviors learned in institutions don't always transfer to the outside world, which is why token economies are controversial.
If the patients return to deviant peer groups, they will be reinforced for socially inappropriate behaviors.

Operant conditioning has been helpful in treating individuals withautism, especially in improving their language deficits.

Mental health professionals offer food and other primary reinforcers the most successful applications of which are to individuals with autism as they reach closer approximations to certain operant conditioning.

The results of Lovaas's work have been promising.

Children who are trained in ABA have better language and intellectual skills than children who don't.

Lovaas' findings are vulnerable to a rival explanation because he didn't randomly assign children with autism to the experimental group.

There is evidence that this was the case.

We've talked about classical and operant conditioning as though they were separate processes.

The truth is more complex.

The similarities between classical and operant conditioning have led some theorists to argue that these two forms of learning aren't as different as previously thought.

In one study, civilians exposed to missile attacks during the 1991 Gulf War became more superstitious than other Israelis.

For many people, superstitions are a way of regaining control over unpredictable environments.