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In behavioral psychology, stimulus control is a phenomenon in operant conditioning that occurs when an organism behaves in one way in the presence of a given stimulus and another way in its absence. A stimulus that modifies behavior in this manner is either a discriminative stimulus or stimulus delta .
Most behavior is under stimulus control. Several aspects of this may be distinguished: Discrimination typically occurs when a response is reinforced only in the presence of a specific stimulus. For example, a pigeon might be fed for pecking at a red light and not at a green light; in consequence, it pecks at red and stops pecking at green.
Discrimination learning is defined in psychology as the ability to respond differently to different stimuli. This type of learning is used in studies regarding operant and classical conditioning . Operant conditioning involves the modification of a behavior by means of reinforcement or punishment.
A simple discrimination learning procedure is one in which a subject learns to associate one stimulus, S+ (positive stimulus), with reinforcement (e.g. food) and another, S− (negative stimulus), with extinction (e.g. absence of food). For example, a pigeon can learn to peck a red key (S+), and avoid a green key (S−).
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.
The stimulus–response model emphasizes the relation between stimulus and behavior rather than an animal's internal processes (i.e., in the nervous system). [2] In experimental psychology, a stimulus is the event or object to which a response is measured. Thus, not everything that is presented to participants qualifies as stimulus.
A stimulus that has been repetitively ignored prior to becoming the target is neither entirely new nor old. This ambiguity slows down the processing of the stimuli. The temporal discrimination model points to this ambiguity as the cause of slowed categorization of the stimulus leading to negative priming effect.
The goal of response prompting is to transfer stimulus control from the prompt to the desired discriminative stimulus. [1] Several response prompting procedures are commonly used in special education research: (a) system of least prompts, (b) most to least prompting, (c) progressive and constant time delay, and (d) simultaneous prompting.