Conditioning Lab
Throughout life, we, as a society, are subjected to numerous situations, where we are conditioned to react in a certain manner. In the lab session, we experienced operant conditioning where one is conditioned to a stimulus, and then reinforced based on that stimulus. There are two types of reinforcers, primary and secondary. Primary reinforcers consist of primary needs such as food and water, and it also is anything that causes harm that you can avoid. On the other hand, a secondary reinforcer is something learned, such as receiving good grades or candy. The experiment in class explored this aspect of learning, through the means of a virtual lab rat. There were two parts to the experiment, during the first part of the experiment, we had to record the number of times the rat scratched himself, licked himself, pressed the bar down, raised himself on two feet, and drank water. This section was timed for 10 minutes. Initially, this task became quite confusing because we were not sure what the actions were, and also the actions were occ
It did take a while to condition, but eventually the subject became conditioned to the specified action. Previously, actions were not performed more than 6-8 times in the fixed time interval, but here the number of times the subject pressed the bar down increased to about 15-18 times. The second section of the experiment was to time and record how many times he performed the actions, as in the first portion of the first section. Only, this time, we did not specifically reward the subject for performing the task of licking himself. The diagram below shows this array of reinforcement schedules. Over the course of the experiment, one gets to condition and train a subject to perform a specific action, give a positive reinforcer, and then remove the reinforcer, while recording the reaction, thus proving greatly that operant conditioning is highly effective and omnipresent in society today. The subject desperately wanted the reinforcer, thus causing him to keep pressing the bar down for the food. Although the number of times he performed the raising action did not decrease, the number of licks also increased. The majority of the actions performed by the rat were raises. Thus I read out the actions, and then my partner recorded the number of times it occurred. The last portion of the experiment was testing the effects of taking away a reinforcer and recording the reactions. This segment was timed and allowed the experimenter to view a conditioned response to a conditioned stimulus. This, in turn, proved the crux of the experiment of conditioned responses with conditioned stimuli as well as the negative attributes of taking away a reinforcer. The second section of the first part of the experiment comprised of keeping positively reinforcing the rat for performing a specific action of your choice. There are four various schedules in which you can reinforce behavior, fixed interval, variable interval, fixed ratio, and variable ratio.
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Acceptance Essays
