Operant conditioning

Question 1

Thorndikes law of effect

Answer 1

Reinforcement - increases behaviour, either positive or negative. Punishment decreases behaviour - either positive or negative.

Question 2

Law of effect (Skinner)

Answer 2

Law of effect is a temporal law - temporal contiguity is important, not a causal relationship. If a reinforcer follows a behaviour, there will be strengthening on this behaviour in its stimulus context

Question 3

Superstition - Skinner (1948)

Answer 3

Trained pigeons to eat from hopper. Present hopper for 15s - went away for a while and came back. Found all birds to be doing different things. – Due to adventitious reinforcement.

Question 4

Neuringer - 1970 - Supersition

Answer 4

Experimental group:
1)3 response dependent hopper presentations = response training
2) 20 sessions of response-independent presentations = non contingent
Control
1) response training –> EXT
2) No response training: only response- independent training
–> Only experimental group showed increased rates of responding = was important that the behaviour was followed by a reinforcer = superstitious behaviour is easy to start and hard to get rid of

Question 5

Bruner & Revusky (1961) - Humans - Superstition

Answer 5

Third key only produced 5s coin, between 8.2-10s. When asked participants reported more than just pressing the third key was necessary, and none reported the time interval was important –> difficulty detecting causality

Question 6

Morse & Skinner (1957)

Answer 6

VI schedule - tested mostly using a yellow keylight, but sometimes changed it to green before back to yellow. Likeliness of reinforcement was constant across the entire experiment. They found that some pigeons increased their rate of responding to the yellow keylight whilst others decreased; as the keylight came either to signal reinforcement or no reinforcement simply by chance.

Question 7

Killeen (1977) - superstition

Answer 7

1) Pigeons response produced a choice = caused
2) Pigeons response did not produce the choice, the computer did = uncaused
–> If the pigeon correctly reported whether it was its own behaviour or the computer that caused the change, it received food reinforcement.
He then varied the reinforcers so that the ‘pigeons caused’ was reinforced at a higher rate (more food). He found that the probability of a false alarm increased –> bias towards the larger reinforcer.
Secondly, with increasing time (delay) after a response before the reinforcer, the probability of a false alarm decreased: less temporal contiguity.
=difficult to detect coincidence form causation