Operant or Instrumental Conditioning

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Operant or Instrumental Conditioning

• Psychology 3306

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Introduction

• Thorndike and his puzzle boxes
• Guthrie and Horton
• Superstitious Behaviour
• Interim
• Terminal
• Adjunctive
• Not exactly superstitious or random

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Shaping

• Successive approximations
• Get closer and closer to behaviour
• Secondary reinforcers
• Feeder click for example
• Behaviour modification

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Freddie!

• Coined the phrase Operant conditioning
• The animal operates on the environment
• Unlike respondent conditioning (Pavlovian)
• Pioneered the use of free operants
• Pioneered the use of respone rate

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The Skinner Box

• Basically this allowed the researcher to walk
  away
• Allowed for a dependent variable that could be
  easily measured and compared across species too

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Criticisms of the Skinner box

• Is it artificial?
• Well duh
• But
• Many species can be tested
• Real world applications
• Therapy
• Who cares?

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Key concepts and terms

• Discriminative stimulus
• Three term contingency
• Acquisition
• Extinction
• Spontaneous recovery
• Generalization
• Conditioned reinforcement
• Response chains

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Constraints

• Instinctive drift and the Brelands
• Autoshaping (Brown and Jenkins, 1968)
• Superstitious behaviour?
• Form of response depends on reinforcer (Jenkins
  and Moore, 1973)
• Wassermans chicks (1973)
• Timberlakes behaviour systems approach

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Schedules of Reinforcement

• You could give a reinforcement after each
  behaviour you are interested in
• This is called CRF or Continuous reinforcement
• However this is rarely used
• Does not maintain behaviour very well

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Schedules of Reinforcement

• Fixed Interval
• First response after a given interval is rewarded
• FI Scallop
• Variable Interval
• Like FI but varies with a given average
• Scallop disappears

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Schedules of Reinforcement

• Fixed Ratio
• Reinforcement is given after a given number of
  responses
• A little less smooth
• Variable Ratio
• After a varying number of responses

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Schedules and their properties

• Variable schedules are more robust
• PREE, Partial reinforcement extinction effect
• Harder to extinguish responding on VI, FI, VR and
  FR than on CRF
• DRL, Differential reinforcement for low rates of
  responding
• DRH, High rates

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Schedule this.

• Concurrent and chained schedules
• Behaviour follows the schedule in effect at the
  time
• Allowed people to determine that the post
  reinforcement pause in FR schedules is due to the
  present schedule and not the previous one

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Applications

• Work with autistic kids
• Prompts
• Fading
• Secondary reinforcers
• Token economies
• I/O applications
• Behaviour therapy

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These ideas are nothing new

• Most folks are unaware of schedules and
  contingencies
• Systematic application thereof
• Who cares?

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Punishment and avoidance
Behavior increases decreases
Positive reinforcement punishment
Negative reinforcement Omission
Stimulus Presented Stimulus Removed
or omitted
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Avoidance

• Shuttle box
• Go from escape to avoidance
• Avoidance paradox
• Two factor theory
• Avoid by escaping CS
• Animals will avoid a CS that predicts shock in
  another context

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But.

• Does the CS induce fear?
• Equivocal at best
• Maybe avoidance itself is reinforcing
• This is the one factor theory
• The Sidman test shows that this is true,
  avoidance itself is reinforcing
• But, temporal conditioning

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Cognitive theories

• Selligman and Johnston
• Expectations
• Animal expects
• No shock if it responds
• Shock if it does not respond
• This explains the slow extinction
• Shock avoidance response blocking, remove the
  ability to escape, you get extinction

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More on avoidance

• Bob Bolles idea about SSDRs
• Learned helplessness
• Is it depression?
• Suggestive, but not quite I dont think

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Punishment

• Opposite of reinforcement?
• Sorta
• But, to be effective it must be
• Introduced at full intensity
• Given immediately
• After every behaviour
• Motivational effects
• Other contingencies and behaviours

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Bad boys bad boys, watcha gonna do?

• Maybe a punisher is an SD?
• All that said punishment CAN control behaviour
• So, whats the down side?

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punishment

• Fear and anger are bad for learning
• General suppression
• Constant monitoring needed
• Avoidance
• Reluctance to use it
• Bad consequences
• It is just plain mean

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Omission

• The avoidance of punishment
• Easily learned
• With all this stuff on punishment, remember
  morality and data are two different things