Download PMHS - Socpsychvita

PMHS
Social Psychology
Name______________________________
AIM: Which type of conditioning does the RAT PROJECT use more:
Pavlov’s classical conditioning or Skinner’s operant conditioning?
Skinner is a major leader in operant conditioning. (OP uses positive and negative
reinforcement to get animals/people to voluntarily act a certain way).
UNDERLINE POSITIVE INFLUENCES IN CRIB
One thing Skinner did was build a conditioning chamber for his daughter as an
improvement over the conventional crib. He had the crib air filtered, heated, and
maintained a constant temperature at an appropriate level of warmth with monitoring to
make any clothing other than a diaper unnecessary. The infant had room to move freely
and there was no danger of smothering or choking. The device was not successful
commercially but is clearly a prototype of today's specialized cribs used in our hospitals.
Skinner used the device with his own daughter in the evening and no harm or abnormal
behavior is found in her life.
His theory was that even while away from parents, babies need comfort. This was
his way of showing his daughter that he cared for her, even when he was not there.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of
Susquehanna. He is also famous for inventing a “SKINNER BOX.”
Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage that has a bar or pedal on one wall that,
when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a food pellet into the cage. The rat is
bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the
bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! In no time at all, the rat is
furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.
What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few
futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the
operant behavior.
Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again
provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will “pop” right back into
existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time.
This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement
history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing
on the bar!
Operant behavior:
(desired behavior)
Positive Reinforcement:
Extinction:
(stimulus added to increase behavior) (no stimulus – behavior stops)
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The rat also learns to associate a light with the positive reinforcement of food. Every
time pellets exist, the light is on. When there are no pellets, the light is off.
What kinds of positive reinforcers (stimuli added to increase behavior) are you using with
rat right now?
(MUST BE GIVEN WITHIN 25 SECONDS)
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE USED MORE IN THIS PROJECT explain why–
classical conditioning
operant conditioning
Under the “condition” of various stimuli,
Reinforcement/consequences
LEARN an emotional or physiological response
influences choices/behavior