The Door stage 1 preparations
In the short story “ The Door “ by author E.B. White, he relates one of the experiments that he conducted to one of his own personal experiences. This was done in a controlled environment, the purpose of this task was to create an alternate reality. An alternate reality is to simulate a substitution of what may be considered reality itself. To achieve this alternate reality this experiment must require an enclosure, in other words a rectangular prism where the walls will be high enough to prevent the rats escape. Not to mention, two other important materials are needed to complete the experiment which include a rat, and food for it. Then the food will be placed behind one of the three contiguous chambers in the enclosure. All three doors will closed yet unlocked, each having a marking of its own on it including a circle, a square and a triangle. Then the rat will be placed inside of the enclosure, thus signifying that the experiment has begun. This experiment will be done several times until an alternate reality is created.
To set up this alternate reality it will take three steps. In the first step the rat will be placed in to open area of the enclosure. While the rat is in this enclosure all doors will be open. Then when the rat is hungry the food will be placed behind the door with the circle. Soon after the rat will try and find this food and to do so it will use the process of elimination. Until the rat finally finds the food it has been looking for, which is the food. This part of the stage will be repeated until the rat has figure out that circle equals food. Thus giving it a specific memory that will later on help create this alternate reality.
Soon after that stage 2 will begin. Where the rat motor memory will be eliminated so that the rat must relay entirely on its visual image of the circle. The one difference in this stage is that the symbols will be changed after each trail. Un-like stage 1 where the circle was place in the center of the two other doors. Then the rat is placed in the enclosure yet again and the rat finds its self using trail and error. Until the rat starts to realize this process isnt working due to te fact that the symbol keeps being moved.
Finding a door to exit would become a puzzling exercise during one of their St. Albans investigations. Terri and Marie were in what is known as “the safe room,” because a large old-fashioned safe is located there. They had completed their investigation and were readying to leave the room when they realized they couldn’t. There wasn’t a door. “It was as if it had been morphed over,” said Terri. “We went around and around in circles. We were growing concerned when we made another lap and there it was. It was as if the door materialized out of nowhere,” she said.
one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who
Hence, in his experiment, Skinner placed rats in the Skinner box and observed its’ behaviors. Initially, these rats would be randomly moving around exploring, and would usually press the bar accidently. At this point, a food pellet would drop into the tray. He observed that if a hungry rat receives a pellet of food when it presses a lever after, maybe 2 minutes have elapsed since the last pellet, then its response rate increases with the passage of time. In other words, after the first incident of the food pellet dropping into the tray, the rate of the rats pressing the bar rises dramatically and remains high until the rats hunger were satisfied. Thus, this study showed a clear association made between the behavior and the consequence of that behavior. In this case, the consequence of a behavior encouraged the repetition of that behavior also known as positive reinforcement.
He took an environmental approach to the study. His method was the use of the operant conditioning box also known as Skinner box helped understand different behaviors that occurred during different environments. He stimulated a system of rewards and punishments and reinforcements. When the pigeon or rat received a reward, the animal performed the behavior more often and when it received a punishment, it performed the behavior less. He first tested positive reinforcement which he made rats press a lever for food. It encouraged the rat to perform more of the behavior. He also used negative reinforcement which added an uncomfortable stimulus. He placed an electric current in the box. The rats learn to avoid it. They even learned to stop when he turned on the light indicating the circuit will soon turn on. This behavior was known as Avoidance or Escape Learning. Both positive and negative reinforcements encourage good behavior. He also used punishment. Unlike the reinforcements, punishments were used to discourage unwanted behaviors rather than promote good behavior. It was performed by adding an unfavorable stimuli or removing the rewarding stimuli. When the rat was punished, its unwanted behavior decreased. When Skinner, removed the punishment, the bad behavior returned. He placed a hungry rat. The rat would pull the lever for food, but no food would come out. The rat later stopped pulling it learning it had no purpose. He studied that the more the rat pulled the lever, the higher the probability that the rat will quit pulling it; he developed an equation known as response and extinction rate. Response rate, the domain, is that rate of how hard a person performed an action and extinction rate, the range, is the rate that the person performed the action less and less. As the response rate increase, so this extinction rate. He used a token economy, a type of positive reinforcement, which a person was given a “token” which can be
In Opening Skinner 's Box, the author uses an assortment of imaginative scenarios in order to foster a more interesting narrative in the readers mind. In my opinion, this technique is a hit and miss, as it can alternately grasp your imagination and make the author seem very incredible. This chapter is an intriguing look at famous psychological experiments, but is overall weakened by the authors rampant imagination. When Slater describes an imaginary scene, like saying the odor in the air is of something rotting, she is plainly trying to foreshadow in her history made fictitious story. Her credibility is besmirched in her attempt to make the history more interesting, as she is preemptively trying to bias the reader. However,
At Harvard, B.F. Skinner looked for a more objective and restrained way to study behavior. Most of his theories were based on self-observation, which influenced him to become a enthusiast for behaviorism. Much of his “self-observed” theories stemmed from Thorndike’s Puzzle Box, a direct antecedent to Skinner’s Box. He developed an “operant conditioning apparatus” to do this, which is also known as the Skinner box. The Skinner box also had a device that recorded each response provided by the animal as well as the unique schedule of reinforcement that the animal was assigned. The design of Skinner boxes can vary ...
Bigger's first encounter with a rat foreshadows what will happen to him later on in the story and explains his reaction to danger. ?The rat automatically becomes a natural enemy and an invader the moment it is discovered in Bigger's apartment? (Hakutani 41). Bigger's family is instantly afraid of the rat and demands its destruction. Buddy blocks the entrance to the rat's home, leaving the rat trapped in the room with no escape. Finally, the rat becomes frenzied and resorts to violence to protect itself from Bigger and Buddy. "The rat squeaked and turned and ran in a narrow circle, looking for a place to hide; it leaped again past Bigger and scurried on dry rasping feet to one side of the box and then to the other, searching for the hole. Then it turned and reared upon its hind legs" (Wright 4). Initially, the rat is shown as helpless, with no intent to hurt Bigger. The rat's fight for its survival becomes so desperate, however, that it leaps at Bigger's pant leg in an attempt to protect itself.
Room' is a story made to prove that there is no such thing as the
The Room itself represents the author’s unconscious protective cell that has encased her mind, represented by the woman, for a very long time. This cell is slowly deteriorating and losing control of her thoughts. I believe that this room is set up as a self-defense mechanism when the author herself is put into the asylum. She sets this false wall up to protect her from actually becoming insane and the longer she is in there the more the wall paper begins to deteriorate. This finally leads to her defense weakening until she is left with just madness and insanity. All of the characters throughout the story represent real life people with altered roles in her mind. While she is in the mental institute she blends reality with her subconscious, forming this story from events that are happening all around here in the real world.
(Bond, Michael; How extreme isolation warps the mind) It was not immediately that the narrator started seeing the women in the yellow wallpaper, nor that her sleeping patterns were changed but more precisely, it was after being in the house after a time had gone by. An experiment was conducted “at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal, led by the psychologist Donald Hebb.” (Bond, Michael; How extreme isolation warps the mind) They had invited and paid people to be their guinea pigs, so to say, in the research.
Ann and John, two characters from he short story "The Painted Door", do not have a very healthy relationship. John is a simple farmer who thinks the only way he can please his wife, Ann, is by working all day to earn money for her. However Ann would prefer him to spend more time with her. Their relationship is stressed even further when Ann is left at home alone with nothing to think about but their relationship because John has to go to his father’s house. The terrible snowstorm accentuates Ann’s feelings of loneliness and despair. John does not pay enough attention to Ann, and therefore creates a weak relationship.
Johnson (1998) introduces two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two “little people,” who live in a “Maze” and go out in search of “cheese,” to achieve nourishment and happiness. Johnson (1998) uses the two mice and the two “little people,” to display the characters’ reactions and coping mechanisms to change: Johnson uses “moving of the cheese,” throughout the book as a metaphor for change. The characters have their individual responses to the loss or moving of the cheese. The mice easily deal with the change and adapt, while using their instincts when responding to the cheese being moved (Johnson, 1998, p. 32). They stay prepared for the change or the move of the cheese, in case they need to go in search of it, by always being equipped with their running gear. Additionally, the mice do not spend time analyzing why the change occurred; instead they immediately sniff and scurry on to find their “new cheese” (Johnson, 1998). On the contrary, the “little people,” Hem and Haw, have overpowering human beliefs and emotions clouding their judgment and making it difficult for them to adapt to the change (Johnson, 1998, p. 27). Hem and Haw react emotionall...
In the video we see Thorndike using a hungry cat and putting that cat in a box in which food is in clear site outside the box, all the cat has to do is to find its way out by pulling or stepping on the treadle or pulling on a wire. When Thorndike first placed the cat in the box he was unable to see any flashes of insight and the successful actions appeared by chance and once the cat realized how to escape they were able to do it quicker and quicker. He doesn’t believe that the animals understand the consequence of their behavior until it happens and this is where trial and error comes from. Animals don’t just come in and see the puzzle and are able to solve it instead they try multiple things might fail or commit error a couple of times and learning from those errors they are able to learn and succeed. A real life example of this is for example a little kid being curious of touching the stove. The little kid doesn’t know the consequence of his or her actions. So when the child touches the hot stove and realizes it was a mistake to do it because it caused pain then the child might not repeat the
Thorndike’s theory is known as trial and error. He places a hungry cat into a cage, and put the food outside the cage. So the cat used trial and error to discover how to get to the food outside the cage. This process was timed and recorded for each attempt. It was found that each time the experiment was repeated with the same cat the time taken was reduced proving t...
Skinner designed an experiment to test operant conditioning, known as a ‘Skinner box’ (Gross 2005). In the box, animals, such as rats, would be conditioned into certain behaviour. For example, by pressing a lever to receive food (Gross 2005).