Operant conditioning pdf PDF

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Psychology notes on operant conditioning. Lecture by Luc Boutsen ...

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Week 3 - Instrumental / Operant conditioning Thorndike’s learning by trial and error and the law of effect - Thorndike’s puzzle box - he concluded that learning initially occurs by trial and error. - law of effect: learning depends on reinforcement. Positive reinforcement e.g. food strengthens the association between stimulus and response, negative reinforcement e.g. shocks weakens it. Skinner’s paradigm of operant conditioning - An animal in a skinner box has to respond in a particular way to a given stimulus in order to receive a positive reward. - The animal operates on the environment to produce a certain outcome. Similarities between CC and OC

Differences between CC and OC

both require the organism to discover contingencies between certain elements.

in CC only contingency between CS and UC is important, whereas in OC contingency between discriminative stimulus and reinforcement and operant response and reinforcement is important.

many phenomena observed in cc are also found in oc e.g., generalisation, discrimination, blocking, second order conditioning

Reinforcement and drive reduction: - reinforcers reduce the drive (drive reduction theory). Drive can be regarded as a variable to describe the motivational state of the organism. - the drive acts like an aversive stimulus that becomes stronger with increasing deprivation. - Hull proposed this theory - the purpose of biological drives is to correct disturbances in homeostasis. - According to Hull, physiological needs result in psychological drive states that direct behavior to meet the needs and, ultimately, bring the system back to homeostasis. Premack principle: - As an alternative to drive reduction theory, Premack proposed to regard reinforcers as activities or behaviour. - According to the Premack principle, an activity that has a higher probability of occurrence will reinforce a lower probability activity. Reinforcement and shaping - response shaping involves gradual and selective reinforcement to produce specific behaviours that an animal would be unlikely to emit naturally. - Shaping of complex behaviours also involves response chaining, to ensure that the elements of the trained behaviour are carried out in the correct temporal order. Superstitious learning - SKINNER (1948) - trained pigeons using an FI schedule - although the appearance of the food had nothing to do with the pigeon’s behaviour, the pigeon developed a sophisticated routine-like behaviour - Skinner explained these behaviours in terms of accidental contiguities; he speculated that such contiguity could cause superstitious behaviour in humans.

Partial reinforcement - The time course of extinction is affected by the previous reinforcement history - don’t condition partially because the extinction time is longer...