Conditioning Lab

A detailed Summary of 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


During the experiment we tested the behavior using reinforcement schedules, or the method in which you can reinforce behavior. There are four various schedules in which you can reinforce behavior, fixed interval, variable interval, fixed ratio, and variable ratio. The fixed interval is a fixed time followed by reinforcement, the variable interval is when you don't know the time but do receive reinforcement, the fixed ratio is based on performance, not time, and the variable ratio is when you don't know how many times you have to do a specific action to pay off. The most performed action is the variable ratio schedule, because the curiosity of receiving reinforcement overcomes all other schedules. The diagram below shows this array of reinforcement schedules.

The last portion of the experiment was testing the effects of taking away a reinforcer and recording the reactions. We were to record the number of times the subject would perform all tasks, but no pellets of food were given at all. This resulted in a significant increase in

Some common words found in the essay are:
, fixed interval, record times, variable ratio, specific action, times subject, subject conditioned, experiment record times, action positive reinforcer, subject perform, reinforcement schedules, action positive, positive reinforcer,

Approximate Word count = 704
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Science

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