Operant Conditioning Flashcards
Why can classical conditioning only take you so far?
Environments are complex:
- wide range of stimuli that often have slightly abstract meanings
Many responses are complex:
- reflexes e.g. eye-blinks are simple and automatic but are only useful in specific circumstances
- in most environmental situations, new behaviours need to be learned
Who is Edward Thorndike (1874-1949) and what did he do?
- An American Psychologist
- an early pioneer of behaviourism
one of the first psychologists to apply psychological principles and perspective to the study of learning
What is Thorndike’s law of effect?
- Behaviour that’s followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated
- behaviour that’s followed by unpleasant consequences is likely to be skipped
Who is Skinner, (1904-1990)?
- An American Psychologist and Philosopher
- founder of ‘radical behaviourism’
- expanded on Thorndike’s law of effect
- coined the term ‘operant conditioning’
What is operant conditioning?
- Control of behaviour through its consequences
- operant in the sense that behaviour ‘operates’ on the environment and produces a consequences
- the nature of the consequences determines whether the behaviour is repeated
- it’s sometimes also called ‘instrumental learning’
What is Reinforcement VS Punishment?
Reinforcement = Used to maintain or increase desired behaviour
Punishment = Used to reduce or eliminate an undesired behaviour
What did Skinner use the ‘Skinner Box’ for?
- Operant Conditioning
- Positive Reinforcement
- Negative Reinforcement
What are the 2 types of reinforcement schedules?
Continuous:
- reinforcement/punishment given every time behaviour occurs
Partial:
- reinforcement/punishment only occurs some of the time when behaviour pccurs
- reinforcement/punishment varies over time and/or over the number of responses
What is reinforcement by varying interval?
Fixed-interval:
- reinforcement only occurs after a fixed period of time, regardless of the number of responses e.g. a monthly salary
Variable-interval:
- reinforcement occurs after randomly varying periods of time e.g. checking your phone for messages
What is reinforcement varying by ratio?
Fixed-ratio:
- reinforcement occurs after a set number of responses e.g. every 20th time the rat pulls the lever, it receives food
Variable-ratio:
- reinforcement occurs after number of responses e.g. playing on a fruit/arcade machine
What is behavioural shaping?
Producing relatively complex behaviours through successive reinforcements
What is primary and secondary reinforcement?
Primary reinforcers:
- things that directly satisfy a need or reflexively drive a response e.g. food
Secondary reinforcers:
- things that have no intrinsic value but come valued through association with primary reinforcement e.g. money
What is the Hebb rule?
Donald Hebb (1904-1985): - neurons that fire together wire together
What are transcortical pathways?
- Direct connections from 1 cortical region to another
- stimuli processed by sensory areas e.g. primary visual cortex
- information transmitted to motor regions in frontal cortex
- typically, most involved in initial learning stages of learning complex activities
What is the ‘Basal Ganglia’ and what does it do?
- Also known as basal nuclei
- control of voluntary motor movements
- cognition
- procedural learning
- emotion
- habits
- eye movements
- Cudate nucleus and putamen receive sensory information and information about both planned and in-progress movements
- transmit information on to globus pallidus]
- which then transmits to frontal and premotor cortices
- People with diseases of the basal ganglia have deficits in learning automatic or operant responses e.g. Parkinson’s disease
- lesions to caudate nucleus and putamen in monkeys impaired visually guided operant learning/conditioning
