Lecture 4 Flashcards
What is operant conditioning?
Operant conditioning (also known as instrumental conditioning) relies on the consequences of past actions influencing future behaviour, resulting in increase or decrease of voluntary behaviours
What are the ways to classify consequences?
Positive and negative
Reinforcement and punishment
What are schedules of reinforcement?
Continuous and intermittent (partial)
What is positive reinforcement?
Adds something to increase a behaviour
(Finish your homework and you can have an ice-cream)
Positive punishment
Adds something to decrease a behavior
(Anti-barking collar)
What is negative reinforcement?
When you take something away to increase a behavior
(Give a student a night off from homework after good marks)
What is negative punishment?
When you remove something to decrease a behaviour
(Being put in time out)
What is continuous reinforcement?
It is when someone is reinforced after each response
What are the 4 partial schedules of reinforcement?
Fixed ratio (instances)
Variable ratio (instances)
Fixed interval (time of behavior)
Variable interval (time of behavior)
What is fixed ratio reinforcement?
It is a reinforcement that occurs every time something happens. (Newspaper being delivered)
What is variable ratio reinforcement?
It is reinforcement that happens on average. (Gambling you win certain amounts of time although it is very small)
What is fixed interval?
It looks at someone’s first behavior after something happens. (What do you do when you first get onto the bus)
What is variable interval?
It is on average the first behavior after doing something after a certain amount of seconds. (For example checking your emails)
How can punishment be done effectively?
- No escape
- It is intense (within limits)
- Continuous schedule
- No delay
- Over a short period of time
- No subsequent reinforcement
- Reinforce incompatible
What are the 3 different reward variables?
Drive
Size
Delay
What is drive?
Someone will be more likely to do something if the person really wants to reinforcement
What is size?
Someone who gets offered more food will want to do a task more
What happens with delay?
Someone will want the reinforcement more if there is no gap between the task and the reward
What is shaping?
Selective reinforcement of behavior resembling the desired target behavior. (Bird half turning to get food, and eventually does a full spin because it realises the experimenter was giving it food when the bird turned.
What is bating?
Baiting is getting the animal to do something and giving it food after
What is mimics?
Animals learn from how we react and they will copy us to get us to respond
What is sculpting?
It is when you use a bit of physical pressure to make an animal do something until it does the action on its own
What is backward chaining?
It is when you learn an action backwards, to slowly learn behaviour then to start from the beginning being clueless.
Can chaining be done backwards and forwards?
Yes
Which chaining is more effective?
Backwards
