Why is operant conditioning interesting

Suppose we reinforce with a food pellet every 5th occurrence of some arbitrary response such as lever pressing by a hungry lab rat.

The rat presses at a certain rate, say 10 presses per minute, on average getting a food pellet twice a minute. Will he press more, or less? The answer is less. Lever pressing is less predictive of food than it was before, because food sometimes occurs at other times.

Exactly how all this works is still not understood in full theoretical detail, but the empirical space — the effects on response strength rate, probability, vigor of reinforcement delay, rate and contingency — is well mapped. What happens during operant conditioning? The experimenter intervened no further, allowing the animal to do what it would until, by chance, it made the correct response. The result was that, according to what has sometimes been called the principle of postremity, the tendency to perform the act closest in time to the reinforcement — opening of the door — is increased.

Notice that this account emphasizes the selective aspect of operant conditioning, the way the effective activity, which occurs at first at 'by chance,' is strengthened or selected until, within a few trials, it becomes dominant. The nature of how learning is shaped and influenced by consequences has also remained at the focus of current research.

Omitted is any discussion of where the successful response comes from in the first place. It is something of a historical curiosity that almost all operant-conditioning research has been focused on the strengthening effect of reinforcement and almost none on the question of origins, where the behavior comes from in the first place, the problem of behavioral variation , to pursue the Darwinian analogy.

Some light is shed on the problem of origins by Pavlovian conditioning, a procedure that has been studied experimentally even more extensively than operant conditioning. In the present context, perhaps the best example is something called autoshaping, which works like this: A hungry, experimentally naive pigeon Figure 2 , that has learned to eat from the food hopper H , is placed in a Skinner box.

Every 60 seconds or so, on average, the response key K lights up for 7 s. As soon as it goes off, the food hopper comes up for a second or two, allowing the bird to eat. No other behavior is required and nothing the bird does can make the food come any sooner. Nevertheless, after a few trials, the pigeon begins to show vigorous stereotyped key-pecking behavior when the key light called the conditioned stimulus: CS , comes on. Eventually, the pigeon is likely to peck the key even if a contingency is set up such that key-pecking causes the removal of the food.

This conditioned response CR is an example of classical conditioning: behavior that emerges as a consequence of a contingent relationship between a stimulus, the CS, and a reinforcer — in this context termed the unconditioned stimulus US.

Autoshaping, and a related phenomenon called superstitious behavior, has played an important role in the evolution of our understanding of operant conditioning.

In the present context it illustrates one of the mechanisms of behavioral variation that generate behavior in advance of operant i. A stimulus like the CS that predicts food generates via built-in mechanisms, a repertoire that is biased towards food-getting behaviors — behaviors that in the evolution of the species have been appropriate in the neighborhood both spatial and temporal of food.

The usual conditioned response in classical conditioning experiments is what Skinner called a respondent, a reflexive response such as salivation, eyeblink or the galvanic skin response GSR. The general principle that emerges from these experiments is that the predictive properties of the situation determine the repertoire, the set of activities from which consequential, operant, reinforcement can select.

Moreover, the more predictive the situation, the more limited the repertoire might be, so that in the limit the subject may behave in persistently maladaptive way — just so long as it gets a few reinforcers.

Many of the behaviors termed instinctive drift are like this. When levels of arousal become too high, performance will decrease; thus there is an optimal level of arousal for a given learning task. This bitonic relation seems to be the result of two opposed effects. On the one hand, the more predictive the situation the more vigorously the subject will behave — good.

Autoshaping was so named because it is often used instead of manual shaping by successive approximations, which is one of the ways to train an animal to perform a complex operant task. Shaping is a highly intuitive procedure that shows the limitations of our understanding of behavioral variation. The trainer begins by reinforcing the animal for something that approximates the target behavior.

If we want the pigeon to turn around, we first reinforce any movement; then any movement to the left say then wait for a more complete turn before giving food, and so on. But if the task is more complex than turning — if it is teaching a child to do algebra, for example — then the intermediate tasks that must be reinforced before the child masters the end goal are much less well defined.

Should he do problems by rote in the hope that understanding eventually arrives? And, if it does, why? Or should we let the pupil flounder, and learn from his mistakes? A few behaviorists deny there even is such a thing. These examples show, I think, that understanding behavioral variation is one of the most pressing tasks for learning psychologists. If our aim is to arrive at knowledge that will help us educate our children, then the overwhelming emphasis in the history of this field on selection reinforcement , which was once appropriate, may now be failing to address some of the most important unsolved problems.

It should be said, however, that the study of operant conditioning is not aimed only at improving our education systems. The recent combination of operant conditioning with neuroscience methods of investigating the neural structures responsible for learning and expression of behavior, has contributed considerably to our current understanding of the workings of the brain.

In this sense, even a partial understanding of how learning occurs once the sought-after behavior has spontaneously appeared, is a formidable goal. Skinner made three seminal contributions to the way learning in animals is studied: the Skinner box also called an operant chamber -- a way to measure the behavior of a freely moving animal Figure 2 ; the cumulative recorder -- a graphical way to record every operant response in real time; and schedules of reinforcement -- rules specifying how and when the animal must behave in order to get reinforcement.

The combination of an automatic method to record behavior and a potentially infinite set of rules relating behavior, stimuli e. Moreover, automation meant that the same animal could be run for many days, an hour or two a day, on the same procedure until the pattern of behavior stabilized.

The reinforcement schedules most frequently used today are ratio schedules and interval schedules. In interval schedules the first response after an unsignaled predetermined interval has elapsed, is rewarded.

The interval duration can be fixed say, 30 seconds; FI30 or randomly drawn from a distribution with a given mean or the sequence of intervals can be determined by a rule -- ascending, descending or varying periodically, for example. If the generating distribution is the memoryless exponential distribution, the schedule is called a random interval RI , otherwise it is a variable interval VI schedule.

The first interval in an experimental session is timed from the start of the session, and subsequent intervals are timed from the previous reward. In ratio schedules reinforcement is given after a predefined number of actions have been emitted.

The required number of responses can be fixed FR or drawn randomly from some distribution VR; or RR if drawn from a Geometric distribution. Schedules are often labeled by their type and the schedule parameter the mean length of the interval or the mean ratio requirement.

For instance, an RI30 schedule is a random interval schedule with the exponential waiting time having a mean of 30 seconds, and an FR5 schedule is a ratio schedule requiring a fixed number of five responses per reward.

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How Pavlov's experiments with dogs demonstrated that our behavior can be Pavlov's Dogs And Classical Conditioning. The psychology driving our clothing choices and how fashion affects your dating Aversion therapy uses the principle that new behavior can be 'learnt' in order If you jumped out of a plane, would you overcome your fear of heights?

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Conditioned Reflexes: An investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex. Thorndike, E. Psychological Review , 5 5 , Skinner, B. Journal of Experimental Psychology , 38 , Ferster, C. Schedules of Reinforcement. Personality Quizzes.

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Imprinting: Why First Impressions Matter How first impressions from birth influence our relationship choices later in Sign Up for Unlimited Access. You May Also Like Staff implementing a token economy programme have a lot of power. It is important that staff do not favor or ignore certain individuals if the programme is to work. Therefore, staff need to be trained to give tokens fairly and consistently even when there are shift changes such as in prisons or in a psychiatric hospital.

A further important contribution made by Skinner is the notion of behavior shaping through successive approximation. Skinner argues that the principles of operant conditioning can be used to produce extremely complex behavior if rewards and punishments are delivered in such a way as to encourage move an organism closer and closer to the desired behavior each time. To do this, the conditions or contingencies required to receive the reward should shift each time the organism moves a step closer to the desired behavior.

According to Skinner, most animal and human behavior including language can be explained as a product of this type of successive approximation. In the conventional learning situation, operant conditioning applies largely to issues of class and student management, rather than to learning content.

It is very relevant to shaping skill performance. A simple way to shape behavior is to provide feedback on learner performance, e. A variable-ratio produces the highest response rate for students learning a new task, whereby initially reinforcement e. For example, if a teacher wanted to encourage students to answer questions in class they should praise them for every attempt regardless of whether their answer is correct. Gradually the teacher will only praise the students when their answer is correct, and over time only exceptional answers will be praised.

Unwanted behaviors, such as tardiness and dominating class discussion can be extinguished through being ignored by the teacher rather than being reinforced by having attention drawn to them. Knowledge of success is also important as it motivates future learning.

However, it is important to vary the type of reinforcement given so that the behavior is maintained. Skinner's study of behavior in rats was conducted under carefully controlled laboratory conditions.

Note that Skinner did not say that the rats learned to press a lever because they wanted food. He instead concentrated on describing the easily observed behavior that the rats acquired. In the Skinner study, because food followed a particular behavior the rats learned to repeat that behavior, e. Therefore research e. Skinner proposed that the way humans learn behavior is much the same as the way the rats learned to press a lever. So, if your layperson's idea of psychology has always been of people in laboratories wearing white coats and watching hapless rats try to negotiate mazes in order to get to their dinner, then you are probably thinking of behavioral psychology.

Behaviorism and its offshoots tend to be among the most scientific of the psychological perspectives. The emphasis of behavioral psychology is on how we learn to behave in certain ways. We are all constantly learning new behaviors and how to modify our existing behavior.

Operant conditioning can be used to explain a wide variety of behaviors, from the process of learning, to addiction and language acquisition. It also has practical application such as token economy which can be applied in classrooms, prisons and psychiatric hospitals.

However, operant conditioning fails to take into account the role of inherited and cognitive factors in learning, and thus is an incomplete explanation of the learning process in humans and animals.

For example, Kohler found that primates often seem to solve problems in a flash of insight rather than be trial and error learning. Also, social learning theory Bandura, suggests that humans can learn automatically through observation rather than through personal experience. The use of animal research in operant conditioning studies also raises the issue of extrapolation. Some psychologists argue we cannot generalize from studies on animals to humans as their anatomy and physiology is different from humans, and they cannot think about their experiences and invoke reason, patience, memory or self-comfort.

McLeod, S. Skinner - operant conditioning. Simply Psychology. Bandura, A. Social learning theory. Ferster, C. Schedules of reinforcement. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Kohler, W. The mentality of apes.

Skinner, B. The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis. New York: Appleton-Century. Superstition' in the pigeon.