Operant Conditioning

Watson’s Extreme Environmentalism

• “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own special world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to be any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”– John Broadus Watson, 1928

Operant Conditioning

• Learning associations between actions and consequences

Operant Conditioning

Behavior

followed by

Reinforcement

Increaseschances of

Law of Effect

• Underlies all of operant conditioning

• “Behavior that is rewarded will be repeated”

Reinforcement

•Reinforcement always seen by target as a GOOD thing

•Used to INCREASE a desired behavior

•Two types of reinforcement

Types of Reinforcement

•Positive Reinforcementadds good thingsExamples: Money, Praise, Food

•Negative Reinforcementtakes bad things awayExamples: removing pain, toothache, hunger

Reinforcement

Increases Behavior

Add Stimulus

Positive Reinforcement

Remove Stimulus

Negative Reinforcement

Reinforcement & Punishment

Increases Behavior

Decreases Behavior

Add Stimulus

Positive Reinforcement

Positive Punishment

Remove stimulus

Negative reinforcement

Negative Punishment

Types of Punishment

•Positive Punishmentadds bad thingsExamples: spanking, bad taste

•Negative Punishmenttakes good things awayExamples: grounded from car, time-outs

Extinction

• Behaviors that are neither rewarded or punished will also decrease

Reinforcement versus punishment

• What works better, reinforcement or punishment?

Shaping

•Rewarding successively closer approximations of a desired behavior

•Useful for teaching new behaviors

•Exp: puppy paper training

Let’s take a moment to recap

Rate of reinforcement

• Continuous reinforcement: reward after every response

• Intermittent reinforcement: only sometimes reward

• Intermittent better• Exp: kids and temper tantrums,

icky boyfriends/girlfriends

Reinforcement Schedules

• Fixed Ratio

• Variable Ratio

• Fixed Interval

• Variable Interval

Fixed Ratio Reinforcement

•Reward after a set number of responses

•Exp: Frequent shopper at Subway

Variable Ratio Reinforcement

•Reward after a varying number of responses

• Exp: “Good job”

Fixed Interval Reinforcement

•Reward after a specific time interval

•Exp: Reward at the end of a half hour of studying

Variable Interval Reinforcement

•Reward after a variable time interval

•Exp: Reward at the end of a 15 minutes, then 10 minutes, then 25

Schedules of Reinforcement

• Steeper lines mean higher response rates

• Ratio schedules produce higher response rates than interval schedules

Extinction

•More rapid to fixed ratio than variable ratio reinforcement

Thus, best is variable ratio

An example of variable ratio…