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When trying to distinguish primary and secondary reinforcers in human examples, use the "caveman test." If the stimulus is something that a caveman would naturally find desirable (e.g. candy) then it is a primary reinforcer. If, on the other hand, the caveman would not react to it (e.g. a dollar bill), it is a secondary reinforcer.
Shaping sometimes fails. An oft-cited example is an attempt by Marian and Keller Breland (students of B.F. Skinner) to shape a pig and a raccoon to deposit a coin in a piggy bank, using food as the reinforcer. Instead of learning to deposit the coin, the pig began to root it into the ground, and the raccoon "washed" and rubbed the coins together.
Learned helplessness is a term to explain a specific pattern of behavior that occurs in both animals and humans. When an animal or human is consistently exposed to an aversive condition (pain, unpleasant noise, etc.) and is unable to escape this condition, that animal or human will become helpless and stop attempting escape.
Just as "reward" was commonly used to alter behavior long before "reinforcement" was studied experimentally, the Premack principle has long been informally understood and used in a wide variety of circumstances. An example is a mother who says, "You have to finish your vegetables (low frequency) before you can eat any ice cream (high frequency)."
Of the concepts and procedures described in this article, a few of the most salient are the following: (a) availability of primary reinforcement (e.g. a bag of dog yummies); (b) the use of secondary reinforcement, (e.g. sounding a clicker immediately after a desired response, then giving yummy); (c) contingency, assuring that reinforcement (e.g ...
In operant conditioning, the delay reduction hypothesis (DRH; also known as delay reduction theory) is a quantitative description of how choice among concurrently available chained schedules of reinforcement is allocated.
Secondary gain can also be a component of any disease, but is an external motivator. If a patient's disease allows them to miss work, avoid military duty, obtain financial compensation, obtain drugs , avoid a jail sentence, etc., these would be examples of a secondary gain.
An example of second-order conditioning. In classical conditioning, second-order conditioning or higher-order conditioning is a form of learning in which a stimulus is first made meaningful or consequential for an organism through an initial step of learning, and then that stimulus is used as a basis for learning about some new stimulus. For ...