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The brain learns more with operant conditioning than classical conditioning because the brain tends to remember unusual things better than common things. In operant conditioning, you must have reinforcement, primary, secondary, positive, and negative reinforcement. Reinforcement is something that follows a response and makes you want to repeat that response. Primary reinforcement is the reinforcement that is first and of greatest importance. Secondary reinforcement is anything that comes as a primary reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is reinforcement that makes you want to repeat a response because the response was good.
A positive reinforcement for kids in school is, if they get good grades, than they will get money and clothes for a job well done. Negative reinforcement is a reinforcement that does not make you want to repeat a response because the response was negative. A negative response for kids in school is if they get bad grades, they will get all their privileges taken away. Therefore, if operant conditioning works than you will learn from the mistakes, you made when you tried to do something and failed or if you did something for the first time and get a negative response. Punishment is a type of negative reinforcement used to weaken a response. In addition, example of operant conditioning is the training of rats to press a lever in order to obtain a food reward.
The pressing of the lever (conditioned response) is associated with the food reward (unconditioned stimulus). After a training period, the rat will show the conditioned response of pressing the lever even without the presence of the unconditioned stimulus of the food. Generalization is also apart of operant conditioning. It is when behavior that spreads from one situation to similar one. If you walk past a person and they wave to say hi, you make a generalization that the next person will wave when you walk past too. Discrimination Learning is learning to tell the difference between one object than another.
If you can discriminate in learning than, you will be able to learn more because you can decipher things better. Pavlov noted that responding to different stimuli as thought they are functionally equivalent is adaptive form animals. Rustling sounds in the undergrowth differ, but rabbits and deer do well to flee when they perceive any of many varieties of rustling. Sirens differ, but people do well to become vigilant or to pull their cars to the side of the road when any siren is heard. In a demonstration of generalization, Pavlov first conditioned a dog to salivate when a circle was presented. During each acquisition trial, the dog was shown a circle, and then given meat powder.
After several trials, the dog exhibited the CR of salivating when presented with the circle alone. Pavlov demonstrated that the dog also exhibited the CR in response to closed geometric figures such as ellipses, pentagons, and even squares. The more closely the figure resembled a circle, the greater the strength of the response (the more drops of saliva that flowed). In operant conditioning, as in classical conditioning, extinction is a process in which stimuli lose the ability to evoke learned responses because the events that had followed the stimuli no longer occur. In classical conditioning, however, the events that normally follow and confirm the appropriateness of the learned response are the unconditioned stimuli. In Pavlov's experiment, the meat powder was the event that followed and confirmed the appropriateness of salivation.
In operant conditioning, the ensuing events are reinforcers. Thus, in operant conditioning, the extinction of learned responses results from repeated performance of operant behavior without reinforcement. After a number of trials, the operant behavior is no longer shown.
Free research essays on topics related to: negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, unconditioned stimulus, operant conditioning, classical conditioning
Research essay sample on Operant Conditioning Unconditioned Stimulus
