Learning is the attainment of new information or knowledge, skills, or responses from experience that causes a fairly permanent change in behavior. There are several ways that a person or animal can learn, but no one theory is solely responsible for how they learn. John B. Watson came up with classical conditioning. This is when two different stimuli are paired together to create a desired response. Watson used the sound of a bell to classically condition dogs when a bell was rung. The sound of the bell is the neutral stimulus, the dogs salivating is the unconditioned response, and the food is the unconditioned stimulus. Once the dog associates the bell with the desired behavior the bell becomes the conditioned stimulus because the dog has …show more content…
Skinner came up with operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is when consequences are used to determine whether a certain behavior will be repeated again. In operant conditioning there is positive and negative punishment and positive and negative reinforcement. Positive punishment and positive reinforcement can both be used to increase the likelihood of good behavior, and positive and negative punishment can be used to decrease the likelihood of behavior. Positive reinforcement is when something good is given to enforce the good behavior, and negative reinforcement is when something good is to make sure that the bad behavior doesn’t happen again. Positive punishment is when something bad is given to make sure that the behavior is less likely to happen, and negative punishment is when something bad is taken away to make sure that the desired behavior happens again. Skinner tested this by putting a mouse inside a box and punishing it when it did something that it was not supposed to do and rewarding it when it did something that it was supposed to …show more content…
There is a fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-interval, and variable-interval schedule. A fixed-ratio schedule reinforces a behavior after a certain number of responses are made. A variable-ratio is based off of how often the desired response is recorded. A variable-interval schedule is a behavior that is reinforced depending on how much time has passed since the last time the behavior was reinforced. A fixed-interval schedule is reinforced at the same time all the time if the desired response is observed. (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner, Nock, n.d., pg. 285)
A good example of classical conditioning is when a teacher gives candy to students when they answer questions correctly. The students start to participate more because they know that if they answer questions correctly, they will get candy. An example of operant conditioning is when a parent takes away their kids phone because they got bad grades in school, or when a kid gets spanked for doing something
Behavior modification is based on the principles of operant conditioning, which were developed by American behaviorist B.F. Skinner. In his research, he put a rat in a cage later known as the Skinner Box, in which the rat could receive a food pellet by pressing on a bar. The food reward acted as a reinforcement by strengthening the rat's bar-pressing behavior. Skinner studied how the rat's behavior changed in response to differing patterns of reinforcement. By studying the way the rats operated on their environment, Skinner formulated the concept of operant conditioning, through which behavior could be shaped by reinforcement or lack of it. Skinner considered his discovery applicable to a wide range of both human and animal behaviors(“Behavior,” 2001).
“Operant conditioning is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior. Through operant conditioning, an association is made between a behavior and a consequence for that behavior” (Cherry). Positive reinforcement which is praising a person for doing something good verses negative reinforcement which is an unpleasant remark a punishment. B.F. Skinner did an experiment on a rat, the rat was taught to push two buttons, one to receive food and the other was a light electric shock. The rat tried both buttons and realized which button was good and which one was bad. This experiment goes to show that upon the rewards and punishment system one can learn their rights from their wrongs through a series of lessons. Kincaid and Hemingway both use operant conditioning to show human behavior under stimulus control.
In the beginning of the article the author stated that the father of operant conditioning was B.F. Skinner. Skinner introduced the concept of reinforcement. Reinforcement was when something was given or taken to increase the likelihood of a certain
He discovered classical conditioning after seeing how the dogs were stimulated to respond to their food and anything related to food such as the noise of the door or person coming towards them (King, 2016). He eventually conditioned the dogs to respond to a bell as it did when it was exposed to the food (King, 2016). Pavlov accomplished this by introducing a neutral stimulus, the bell, which is a stimulus that doesn’t result in a response like conditioned or unconditioned stimuli (King, 2016). Initially, in this experiment salivation was an innate response to food, but after the introduction of the bell, it became a conditioned response because the dog learned that every time the bell rang, its food came along with it (King, 2016). Consequently, making the bell a conditioned stimulus which is a stimulus that resulted in a response after many times that the neutral stimulus was presented with the food (King,
Learning in its most basic form is our minds associating one thing with another. Digging deeper reveals that there are trends in how human beings and animals learn by association, usually this is done by a brain connecting one event to another. The two different ways a brain tends to learn is through either classical conditioning or operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is learning to associate one stimulus with another stimulus, and Operant Conditioning is learning by associating a response or behavior with a consequence. Knowing how people and animals learn is an important piece of knowledge if one is to help benefit the greater good.
Made famous by Pavlov, classical conditioning pairs a neutral simulis with one that produces a response to get a conditioned response (Ormrod, 2012, pp. 34-35). Pavlov experiments with dogs is one of the perfect example of classical conditioning, the other perfect example is Watson demonstration with little Albert and the white furry rat. In both demonstrations the neutral stimuli became a conditioned response. It important to note that in classical conditioning the learner is passive, absorbind and automatically racting to a stimuli (Papalia & Feldman, 2010, p.
Probably thestrongest application of classical conditioning is emotions. Human emotions are condition extremelyeasily to things that provoke strong reaction, things such as Adolf Hitler, theIRS, the American Flag and chemistry class because of their associations withour emotions. If something like thatprovoked a strong emotion before in your life when brought up in conversationthe strong emotion that was conditioned comes up also. For example when a person meets someone withthe same name as someone they previously lik...
II. The strengths of classical conditioning The strength of classical conditioning is that it can help to explain all aspects of human behavior. Any of behavior can broke down into stimulus-response association, so that according to the classical conditioning, conditioned stimulus will lead conditioned response to occur, then the scientist can observe and determine the behavior (McLeod, 2014). In the case of Pavlovian conditioning, he found that when the conditioned stimulus (bell) was paired with an unconditioned stimulus (food) was presented to the dog, it would start to salivate.
What is Watson’s Classical Conditioning? Classical Conditioning was found by Dr. Ivan Pavlov. Watson’s research was influenced by Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning Theory. Watson made a research on children’s emotions using the Classical Conditioning model. According to Watson, love, fear, and anger are the three kinds of emotions inherited by humans (Hall 1988). He believed these emotions could be learned through conditioning. He formed his hypothesis and carried out an experiment. John B. Watson’s classical condition experiment was on a child named Little Albert. This experiment was while a child was playing with a rabbit, smashing two bars to make a loud noise behind the child’s head. After hearing the loud noise the child became terrified of the rabbit (Hall 1988).
Behaviourist such as John B. Watson believes that our live style is influenced by our own environment, that what we are, is as a result of what we have learnt from the environment. He presumed that, our learning from the environment is through two main behaviourist processes called classical and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning includes learning by association supported by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, who associated the salivating of the dog for food to the ringing of the bell, thereby conditioning the dog in learning new behaviour (natural response and neutral stimuli).
With Skinner introducing the effects of consequences on behavior, he went onto researching operant responses, which then lead to operant conditioning. Thus introducing positive and negative reinforcements/punishments.
The first example of operant conditioning is that sometimes my two-year-old throws a tantrum, I attempt to decrease that behavior by popping him, which would be considered a positive punishment. My second example is me trying to potty train my two-year-old. I want to increase him using the potty, so when he does this I reward him with a sticker (positive reinforcement). If the potty
Classical conditioning is a process that often takes place in a person or animal without the subject noticing. Classical conditioning is when an originally impartial stimulus begins to elicit some kind of response. This occurs when the originally neutral stimulus is paired with a different stimulus that produces a response (Weiton 216). After pairing the two stimuli together multiple times, the subject unknowingly connects them together. Therefore, one stimulus creates the same reaction as another. This type of conditioning is a natural response, and therefore, involuntary (McEntarffer 136).
B.F. Skinner is a major contributor to the Behavioral Theory of personality, a theory that states that our learning is shaped by positive and negative reinforcement, punishment, modeling, and observation. An individual acts in a certain way, a.k.a. gives a response, and then something happens after the response. In order for an action to be repeated in the future, what happens after the response either encourages the response by offering a reward that brings pleasure or allows an escape from a negative situation. The former is known as positive reinforcement, the latter known as negative reinforcement (Sincero, 2012). A teenager who received money for getting an “A” is being positively reinforced, while an individual who skips a class presentation is being negatively reinforced by escaping from the intense fear and anxiety that would have occurred during the presentation.
Classical conditioning and operant conditioning both played a key role in the history of the study of learning, but, as argued by B.F Skinner, there are key differences to be noted between the two (Gleitman, Gross, Reisberg, 2011).