Operant Conditioning the Term Operant

Operant Conditioning

The term operant conditioning was invented by B.F. Skinner in 1937 in the background of reflex physiology, to differentiate what he was interested in; behavior that affects the environment - from the reflex-related subject matter of the Pavlovian conditioning. Operant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Operant conditioning is distinguished from Pavlovian conditioning as operant conditioning deals with the modification of "voluntary behavior" through the use of consequences, while Pavlovian conditioning deals with the conditioning of behavior so that it occurs under new antecedent conditions. The word "Operant Conditioning" was used by B.F.Skinner to clarify the effects of consequences of a specific conduct on the upcoming happening of that conduct. It can be categorized in four parts which are Positive and negative reinforcement, punishment and extinction. Positive and negative reinforcement help to make the conduct stronger, while punishment and extinction is a negative factor for the behavior and thus it weakens the activity or behavior. (B.F Skinner pg 429-432) the Positive Reinforcement describes a situation in which the behavior is supported or built stronger by the help of going through a positive condition. For instance: A mouse that is starving presses a bar in its cage and gets food. This food becomes a positive condition for the starving mouse. Thus this makes the mouse press the bar for more food so that he can get the food again. This action done by the mouse is supported by the end result of receiving food (i.e. A positive condition.

The Negative Reinforcement describes a situation in which the behavior is supported by the fear of avoiding a negative situation. For instance: A mouse is positioned in a cage and it instantaneously receives a mild electrical shock. The shock becomes a negative state for the mouse. And as the mouse presses a bar the shock discontinues. The mouse gets another electrical shock soon after which leads him to press the bar again and the shock discontinues again. The act of pressing the bar by the mouse is supported by the end result of stopping the shock which is a negative factor for the mouse. Thus a negative factor is naturally avoided by any being.

In Punishment a specific behavior is destabilized by the effect of going through a negative situation. For instance: A mouse presses a bar in its cage and gets a mild electrical shock. The shock harms the mouse a bit and thus is a negative factor for the rat. The rat presses the bar again and gets a shock again. Thus the next time the rat doesn't press the bar, and this behavior of rat is weakened due to the effect of receiving a shock.

In Extinction a specific behavior is destabilized by the effect of not going through a positive condition or discontinuing a negative condition. For instance: A mouse presses a bar in its cage and no viable result occurs. Neither a positive nor a negative result comes up. The mouse presses the bar again and still nothing takes place. This weakens the action of pressing the bar by the mouse and this weakening occurs because the mouse doesn't experience anything positive or stopping of anything negative.

Variations in activities are the consequence of an individual's reaction to events (stimuli) that take place in the atmosphere. A reaction generates a result which is opposite to the movement. For instance if a person touches hot water he will instantly move his hand back. When a stimulus is enforced a person is conditioned to respond according to the stimulus. Operant Conditioning is different from other forms of behaviorism. One characteristic of operant conditioning that makes it different with others is that the organism can produce responses instead of only educing response owing to an external stimulus. (Sandy S., Laura Ruth 66-68)

B.F. Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna. He was perhaps the most renowned psychologist since Sigmund Freud. Skinner had a belief in Behaviorist theories. The study of behaviorist theory explores the function of education in the improvement of personality. The psychologists learn circumstances and conditions that have an influence on the learning of behavior. Skinner describes personality in terms of behavior. Skinner was a leading behaviorist; he was a promoter of operant conditioning, and the architect of the Skinner box for smoothing the progress of experimental observations.

Skinner observed that the process of learning should be separated and partitioned into a huge list of small steps and reinforcement must be subject to the accomplishment of each step. It was also observed and stated by the Skinner that small steps reduce the chances of mistakes and encourages the occurrence of reinforcement. According to Skinner's views punishment is not a way to encourage good things in a person. Punishing a child for doing a mistake or a bad habit lessens the chances of that occurrence again. Instead of discouraging and punishing for a bad habit or deed one must give confidence and facilitate the good thing or action.

Operant behavior is the behavior which is controlled or managed by its consequences. If viewed in practical use, operant conditioning can be defined as the study of reversible behavior which is maintained by the help of reinforcement programs. The term was new, but its referent was not fully new. Operant behavior, though put in plain words by Skinner as behavior "controlled by its consequences" is in practice little unlike from what had formerly been expressed "instrumental learning" and what most people would term habit. Any well-trained "operant" is in result a habit.

All along with other possessions of organism, the capability to learn is a product of development. Learning arises because it supports the dissemination of the genetic code of the organism that possesses the ability to learn. There are few sort of learning, plus sensitization, habituation, imprinting, traditional or respondent conditioning, and instrumental or operant conditioning. Of these, it is the last with which we are concerned here; generally speaking, operant conditioning is the adaptation of behavior by its effects. Education is generally concerned with altering behavior by managing for good effects to go after attractive behavior. For instance, when a student's outstanding thesis gets praise from the professor, we expect that the student will write admirable things in the prospect.

The organism is in the procedure of "operating" on the surroundings, which in common terms means it is moving around the world, doing what it does. For the duration of this "operating" the organism comes across particular kind of motivation, known as reinforcing stimulus, or in simple words re-in forcer. This particular motivation has the consequence of developing the operant - which is the manners happening just before the re-in forcer. This is operant conditioning: "the act is followed by the effect, and the nature of the effect changes the organisms' tendency to repeat the behavior in the prospect." Say you have a dog when you throw a ball at him and he catches it then you give him any thing he likes. Then after that sudden the dog starts to catch toys when you throw it in the air or at his mouth. So the operant is the behavior just earlier to the re-in forcer, which is the treat.

The things which were actually new were Skinner's technique of automated training with alternating reinforcement and the subject matter of reinforcement schedules. Skinner and his contemporaries and students revealed in the following decades a totally unsuspected variety of powerful and orderly schedule effects that provided novel tools for understanding learning processes and new phenomena to confront theory. A reinforcement schedule is any practice that delivers a re-enforcer to an organism according to some precise rule. The common re-enforcer is food for a hungry rat or pigeon; the usual schedule is one that delivers the re-in forcer for a switch-closure caused by a peck or lever press. Reinforcement schedules have also been used with human subjects, and the consequences are generally comparable to the consequences with animals. Yet, for moral and realistic reasons, somewhat weak re-in forcers must be used - and the array of behavioral strategies people can take on, is undoubtedly greater than in the case of animals. This assessment is limited to work with animals. Two types of reinforcement schedules have raised the most significance. Most admired are time-based schedules such as fixed and variable interval, in which the re-in forcer is delivered after a set or variable time period after a time marker (usually the foregoing re-in forcer). Ratio schedules require a fixed or variable number of response before a re-in forcer is conveyed. Trial-by-trial versions of all these free-operant trials exist. For instance, a version of the fixed-interval schedule exclusively adapted to the study of interval timing is the peak-interval procedure. For hypothetical basis, Skinner supposed that operant behavior should involve a response that can easily be repeated, such as pressing a lever, for rats, or pecking an illuminated disk (key) for pigeons. The rate of such behavior was considered to be significant as a measure of responsive strength (Skinner 1938, 1966, 1986; Killeen & Hall 2001). True or not, the emphasis on response rate has resulted in a scarcity of investigational work by operant conditioners on non-recurrent behavior such as movement in space.

Operant conditioning differs from other type of learning study in one important aspect. The focus has been more or less entirely on what is called 'reversible behavior', that is, behavior in which the steady-state model under a given schedule is stable, meaning that in a series of conditions, XAXBXC..., where each condition is preserved for enough days that the pattern of behavior is locally stable, behavior under schedule X shows a pattern after one or two duplications of X that is forever the same. For instance, the first time an animal is exposed to a fixed-interval schedule, after quite a few daily sessions nearly all animals show a "scalloped" pattern of responding (pattern a): a pause after each food delivery -- also called wait time or latency -- followed by responding at an hastened rate until the next food delivery. Yet, some animals illustrate slight wait time and a steady rate (pattern B). If all are now trained on some other procedure -- a variable-interval schedule, for example -- and then after numerous sessions are returned to the fixed-interval schedule, almost all the animals will revert to pattern a. Thus, pattern a is the stable pattern. Pattern B, which may persist under unchanging conditions but does not recur after one or more intervening conditions, is sometimes termed metastable (Staddon 1965). The vast majority of published studies in operant conditioning are on behavior that is stable in this sense.