Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Skinner became an atheist after a Christian teacher tried to assuage his fear of the hell that his grandmother described. [14] His brother Edward, two and a half years younger, died at age 16 of a cerebral hemorrhage. [15] Skinner's closest friend as a young boy was Raphael Miller, whom he called Doc because his father was a doctor.
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.
The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization.
Skinner box. An operant conditioning chamber (also known as a Skinner box) is a laboratory apparatus used to study animal behavior. The operant conditioning chamber was created by B. F. Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. The chamber can be used to study both operant conditioning and classical conditioning. [1] [2]
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. [1] [2] It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and ...
Operant conditioning originated with Edward Thorndike, whose law of effect theorised that behaviors arise as a result of consequences as satisfying or discomforting. In the 20th century, operant conditioning was studied by behavioral psychologists, who believed that much of mind and behaviour is explained through environmental conditioning.
This is a list of books and articles by and interviews with the British intellectual historian, Quentin Skinner. [1] Regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought for his work on historical method, [2] Skinner's principal empirical focus as a historian has been on the history of Early Modern political thought.
Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, ISBN 0393050955), is a book by Lauren Slater.. In this book, Slater sets out to describe some of the psychological experiments of the twentieth century.