1. Section 4: Principles of Operant Conditioning
Psychology Chapter 9
Section 4: Principles of Operant Conditioning

2. Wade and Tavris © 2005 Prentice Hall
The “Skinner Box”
When a rat in a Skinner box presses a bar, a food pellet or drop of water is automatically released.
Similar boxes exist for pigeons & many other species.
Figure 8.05 from
Wade, C., & Tavris, C. (2002). Invitation to Psychology, 2nd Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Wade and Tavris © Prentice Hall

3. Extinction- procedure that causes a previously learned response to stop
Occurs when the reinforcer that maintained the response is removed or is no longer available
gradual

4. Stimulus Generalization & Discrimination
Generalization occurs when responses generalize to the stimulus that were not present during the original learning situation but resemble that original stimulus
Sometimes a human or animal learns to respond to a stimulus only when a discriminative stimulus is present

5. The discriminative stimulus signals whether a response, if made, will pay off
Traffic lights, doorbells, ringing phone, etc

6. Learning on Schedule Continuous Reinforcement:
A reinforcement schedule in which a particular response is always reinforced.
Intermittent (Partial) Schedule of Reinforcement:
A reinforcement schedule in which a particular response is sometimes but not always reinforced.
Explains why people get attached to “lucky” hats, etc

7. Patterns of reinforcement affect the rate, form, & timing of behavior
If you want a response to persist after it has been learned, you should reinforce it intermittently, not continuously
If you are going to extinguish an undesirable behavior by ignoring it, you must be consistent in with holding reinforcement

9. Shaping
For a response to be reinforced, it must first occur
You start by reinforcing a tendency in the right direction & then you gradually require responses that are more similar to the final, desired response
Successive approximations
Animal training- seeing eye dogs

11. Biological Limits on Learning
Operant conditioning always works best when they capitalize on inborn tendencies
Beware of instinctive drift
Humans can be affected by biology, genetics, & the evolutionary history of our species

12. Skinner: The Man and the Myth
Burrhus Frederick Skinner,
Better known as B.F. Skinner
Much misinformation is circulated about his life & work
e.g., his daughters grew up normal, despite rumors that they were institutionalized
Figure 8.05 from
Wade, C., & Tavris, C. (2002). Invitation to Psychology, 2nd Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.