Phase 2 Part 1

Operant behavior:  The operant behavior is part of operant conditioning where subjects associate behaviors with the consequences.  The operant behavior is the behavior that acts on the environment to produce a rewarding or punishing stimuli. For example, if a child is crying and wants attention from his or her parents, the crying is the operant behavior and the reinforcement is if the parents attend to the crying child.

Law of effect:  Law of effect is defined as "Rewarded behavior is likely to recur."  If a subject associates a good reward with a behavior, the subject will usually do the behavior again in hopes of the same reward.  For example when a dog performs a trick and receives a treat.

Skinner box (operant chamber): An experimental chamber in which an animal, usually rat or pigeon, presses or pecks on bars or keys to release food or water as a reward.  the chamber records the responses and experiments on operant conditioning.



Shaping:  Skinner used shaping in his experiment where he used reinforces such as food to change and guide an animal's actions toward a certain wanted behavior.  For example, shaping occurs when one tries to train a dog how to do a trick or go to the bathroom outside.

Successive approximations:  After first observing how a subject reacts before training, an experimenter would continue based on the initial behavior.  By changing rewards and rewarding responses that are closer to the desired behavior.  The next time, take a step closer to the desired behavior before they are rewarded until the behavior is reached.

Discriminative stimulus: Discriminative stimulus test if a subject can discriminated between different shapes, colors, sizes, and objects.  With one actions or experiment of the same object, but just different shapes or colors, a subject could react one way with one shape but different with another.  For example, if a dog learns to bark upon seeing a blue ball, but lay down upon seeing a green ball of the same shape and size.

Reinforcement:  Reinforcement is the action or an event that causes the first action to occur more often.  Reinforcement is anything that increases a behavior.

Positive reinforcement:  Positive reinforcement is when a subject is given something as a stimuli after a behavior.  This would make the subject do the behavior more often.  An example is giving a child encouragement and praise after cleaning their room. 

Negative Reinforcement:  Negative reinforcement is when a stimulus is removed.  This can also increase the likelihood of a behavior.  An example is when a child is whining and the parents take away the toy.  Also detention is taking away a student's time.
~~Amanda