Ferseter (2002). Schedules of Reinforcement with Skinner, Journal of the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior, 77, 303-311.
Summary
This article discusses Ferseter’s personal experience working with Skinner on the pigeon experiments. C. B. Ferseter states how he got involved with the experiment and what he learned from working with Skinner. The pigeon lab looked at schedules of reinforcement and the analysis of behavior. This article is more of a personal paper looking at Ferseter’s personal thoughts and experience on the experiments than a scientific journal. This gave readers more context and information on the pigeon lab and Skinner. This article also gave insight to how Skinner interacted with the other researchers and how they worked with
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B. Ferseter was affective at giving his readers insight on working with Skinner. His personal experience made the reading easy to read and it also made it more interesting. Academic articles can often be boring and filled with complicated phrases and words. This article was simple and affective at giving readers information on an important experiment. Ferseter also gives explanations and extra details that Skinner may have left out in his reports. He gives details about how the team interacted with each other and how there was a lack of personal support. I enjoyed how Ferseter stated that Skinner may not have been aware of the lack of personal support, but most of the team was. Ferseter was reinforced naturally but many of his peers needed personally support. I find it interesting that the experiments were about reinforcement but Skinner neglected to positively reinforce his …show more content…
F. Skinner prompted me to write in 1958: ‘‘A potential reinforcing environment exists for every individual, however, if he will only emit the required performances on the proper occasions.”
I like this quote because I feel like it can be applied to every day occasions. You must put in the work to have a preferred outcome. I also like how the author relates this to his experience in the pigeon lab. For example, you must study on the proper occasions and do what is required of you to pass a class. The environment and outcomes can reinforce behaviors.
“There is a fear of the unknown in research just as there is a fear of dealing with new people. We approach a new problem or a new person with a repertoire that comes from our past experience.”
I found this quote interesting because I feel that almost everyone of us can relate to the fear of dealing with new people. I have done very little research in my life, so I like how Ferseter mentions a more relatable fear. Humans fear the unknown. I feel like this quote made me feel like the researchers were all human. When reading academic articles, I often forget that researchers are actual people with fears and that they don’t have the answer for everything. I also like how he mentions how past experiences shape how we approach the unknown. Our past experiences are so important because they create and shape our
Skinner, B.F. A Brief Survey of Operant Behavior. Cambridge, MA: B. F. Skinner Foundation. 1938
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,
B. F. Skinner revolutionized the field of psychology through his numerous writings on behaviorism. However, he began his collegiate life as an English major, and his education in literary techniques and devices clearly shows through in the manipulation of metaphor in his famous novel Walden Two. Although Skinner rarely diverges from the incessant description of behavioral engineering through his mouthpiece in the novel, Frazier, he occasionally digresses from the theory and application of scientific experimentation to the literary elements that are essential to any novel. One of these elements, the metaphor of the sheep that appears at the beginning and end of the book, clearly embodies three principles of Skinner’s behaviorist rationale: the superiority of positive reinforcement over negative reinforcement, the necessity for humans to accept their roles, and the function of the Walden Code to the members of Walden Two.
...ss to the field of behavioral psychology, he did face some criticism regarding the reliability of his experiments. Psychologists who do not support Skinner’s work claim that his research using rats and pigeons does not translate into human behavior. Many people believe that the human mind is much more complex than that of small animals. It is common among those in the psychology field to believe that reinforcement and rewards are not the only causes of behavior.
The first podcast that I listened too was Episode 191 from the audioboom.com website. This was titled “What Was B.F. Skinner Really Like?”. I liked this podcast a lot because it gave a lot of quotes from Skinner himself. In the podcast, the host started off by talking about how Skinner was “a real human”. He wanted to point out that Skinner did in fact have feelings and he was not a stereotypical psychologist. One of the first Skinner clips that he played was one where Skinner talked about good behavior in children. Skinner asked the question, “How is good behavior reinforced.” He talked about how there is no real positive reason for treating people well because you don’t get rewarded from it. Skinner also thinks that mistreatment of others should result in punishment.
Hotherstall, David. History of Psychology. (B.F. Skinner). Ed. Ukn. New York: McGraw Hill, 2003. Print.
Skinner demonstrated how negative support functioned by setting a rodent in his Skinner box and afterward subjecting it to a disagreeable electric current which brought about it some distress. As the rodent moved about the container it would incidentally thump the lever. Quickly it did as such the electric current would be turned off. The rats immediately figured out how to go straight to the
During the 1920s, Many psychologist and behaviorists started coming up with new ways of learning excluding classical conditioning. One of the most well known of this time was Burrhus Frederic Skinner, better known as B.F. Skinner. Though, some behaviorist, such as John B. Watson who performed the Baby Albert experiment, were a bit more extreme than B.F. Skinner, mostly because Skinner performed his experiments using rats rather than babies. Skinner’s belief was that it is much more simple and that it is easier to study observable behaviors versus internal ones. Skinner also believed that classical conditioning was not complex enough to explain something as complex and intricate as humans are. He is credited for what was a new form of learning,
Dominating his field in the mid-twentieth century, Skinner came up with his own theory of behaviorism and its extension to radical behavior (Information Philosopher Website, n.d.). Skinner theorized that all human behavior is caused by operant conditioning and “reinforcement” of selected responses with either punishment or reward (Information Philosopher Website, n.d.). With this new theory, came Skinner’s idea that free will was just a made-up construct by human beings to explain their actions and decisions. After his new discovery, B.F. Skinner published a book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in 1913, to express his ideas that internal psychological states such as intentions, purposes, and goals are all predicted behaviors discovered by science, which ultimately led to the performance of multiple experiments on his part in order for Skinner to prove his new-found idea that free will does not, and never did, exist (Information Philosopher Website,
B. F. Skinner’s behavior theories have been implemented in school systems in a variety of ways. Teachers rewarded students for good behavior long before Skinner’s theory came about. However, many classroom behavior managements systems used in today’s schools are influenced by his work. Skinner stressed immediate praise, feedback, and rewards when seeking to change bad behavior or encourage correct behavior in the classroom. BF Skinner wanted the goal of psychology to be practical. When dealing with education he thought one should find ways to make education effective and enjoyable for all students. His learning theories depended on the assumption that the best way to modify behavior was to modify the environment. Skinner’s ideas for
Operant behavior basically studies how something reacts when given something or has something taken away and its reflex through adaption. (Iverson, 1992, P.1). Also another major study was experienced through Edward Thorndike’s (Problem box). Edward Thorndike made a box of obstacles for a cat to get in the box and try to escape by pressing a simple lever. (Iverson, 1992, P.1). Skinner studied this experiment and decided to come up with his own experiment through rats. Skinner took a different path than Thorndike did with his experiment. Skinner was mainly interested in how the rat behaved to finding food. Thorndike based his study on the object that was being experimented on and if it could escape by accomplishing the same task by learning to do it over and over again. Skinner on the other hand wanted to know what level of difficulty the rat would go through to get food. (Iverson, 1992, P.1).
B.F. Skinner: He was one of the prominent propionates of a theory called behaviourism. He also constructed what became known as the ‘Skinner Box’. Within this box, he discovered that a rat or a bird could be trained to obtain food by pressing a button. This he called ‘Operant Conditioning’ and ‘Negative Reinforcement’. According to Martin Fiebert, Professor of clinical Psychology at California State University, he even went to extremes of placing his own baby daughter in his ‘Skinner Box’ for a whole year to promote his experiments.
Reinforcement is a vital element in Skinner's Stimulus-Response Theory. A reinforcer is anything that strengthens a desired response, such as verbal praise, or a good grade. Skinner's theory also covers negative reinforcers, and punishment that lead to the reduction of undesired responses. Further, attention is given to schedules of reinforcement used to establish and maintain behaviour.
B.F. Skinner is a behavioral psychologist. He took the extremely experiment with the rates that were conditioned to perform simple behaviors, such as pressing a lever or pecking at a disk, then to receive the food rewards. By stimulus animals in a general environment, he kept the animal from sex activity, building a nest, and feeding them in a physiological condition, the response was the animal did everything, such as turning toward or away from a light, jumping at a sound. The result was they did can do more highly organized activity. Could he shift his experience and theories directly to the human beings? Traditionally, based on the assumption behavior arised from the cause those were within the individual. All individual were held responsible for their conduct and given credit for their achievements. Skinner believed that the operant conditioning principles could, and should, be applied on a broad scale. The psychology experiment may need to minimize the human mind and the inner personalities as well as separated the self-determinism. He set the experiment in order to prove the man was the summation of his experiences and stimulates which intruded the consciousness and unconsciousness. As a result, he realized that the conditioning could be applied to explain human behavior because the subject matter of human psychology was only the behavior of the human being. For example, a child ride in a car over a dilapidated bridge, his father made jokes about the bridge collapsing and all of them falling into the river below. The father found this funny and so decided to do it whenever they crossed the bridge. Years later, the child has grown up and now is afraid to drive over any bridge.
This experiment was based on rats and pigeons and wanted B.F Skinner wanted to make them learn fast. Schedules of Reinforcement is how often a response happens from either a reinforcement or punishment. He used different schedules to figure out the best way. The two schedules used are: The first schedule is continuous reinforcement. This is when Reinforcement and punishment are giving all the time, instead of some of the time. The second schedule is partial reinforcement. This is when Reinforcement and punishment are given some of the time, instead of all the time. There are four types of partial reinforcement and this is focused on either ratio or interval. There are also fixed or variable, that are subtypes of ratio and schedules.