Sea Lions and Mice, Oh My!

In this post, I'm going to be talking about B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning, the counterpart to classical conditioning. One main thing that B.F. Skinner, who was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, and inventor, was focused on was reinforcement and punishment. Here we go!

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in 1904 in a small town in Pennsylvania to a lawyer father and a housewife mother. He had one brother who died at the age of 16. Surprisingly, Skinner's first degree was not in psychology. As a child and into adult life, he loved to write. He wrote poems, stories for the paper, and short stories. He received a BA in English from Hamilton College (NY). After graduating, he lived in a few different places, but was not happy. He went back to college, HARVARD in fact, and got a masters, then a doctorate in psychology. After some continued research at Harvard, he became a teacher at the University of Minnesota. Then, love came. He met and married Yvonne Blue, with whom he had two daughters. Skinner chose his second daughter to try out one of his experiments. He had an experiment in which an infant was to be raised in a crib/playpen with glass sides and air conditioning. Obviously, the experiment did not receive a popular following. To brief over the last of his life, he went back to Harvard where he spent the rest of his educational life. He died of leukemia in 1990.

Ok you may be thinking, "So what? It's just a psychologist's boring life." Well, that was just a
simple, brief autobiography. Did you catch that I didn't mention reinforcement in that little briefing? If so, good job. If not, I wouldn't leave you hanging like that! Before I continue, watch this.

Did you notice what each sea lion got when they performed a trick? Fish is right, but if you answered reinforcement (or a positive consequence), that's even more correct! This idea of reinforcement comes from Skinner, so let me explain where he got it from.

Operant conditioning: change in behavior because of reinforcement or lack thereof 

In 1938, BF Skinner coined this term, but also created 3 types of responses that can possible follow behavior:

neural operants: does not increase or decrease the likelihood of a certain behavior

reinforcers: increase likelihood of behavior being repeated

punishers: decrease likelihood of behavior being repeated

So now we come to the Skinner Box. Skinner created this box to well, reinforce, his idea of punishment and reinforcement. 

Skinner would place a rat in the box. As you can see in the picture, there was a lever on one side of the box. This lever, when activated, would release a food pellet. The rat started to realize this fact. After several times of a rat accidentally hitting the lever, when put into the box, they immediately went to the lever to receive their positive reinforcement, their food. 

Let's take a look back at the video of the sea lions. The sea lions are well taught that if they perform the trick that the handlers tells them to, they too will receive their positive reinforcement, the fish! This will strengthen the probability of the behavior being performed again. Hmmm, that kind of sounds like a reinforcer...

So that was positive reinforcement. What about negative reinforcement? Skinner performed the same experiment with rats and his Skinner box. He started the experiment the same way as positive reinforcement with placing the rat into the box with a lever. However, he included an electrical current and removed the reward of food. As the rat would move around the box, it would accidentally knock the lever, switching off the electrical current. Same with the food, after a few tries, the rats would learn to go directly to the lever. This taking away of an unpleasant reinforcer also strengthens behavior. 

The opposite of reinforcement can be seen as punishment. It performs the opposite result of reinforcement: attempts to weaken or terminate a response. 

It actually can be done just like reinforcement. Say the rats in Skinner's box did something bad. Say the rats started chewing on the box. Punishment would be shocking the rat with an electrical current or removing food from the box. One of the most important facets to remember is that punishment and negative reinforcement can be easily confused.

I hope this helped specify the differences between reinforcement and punishment. Next time I'm back, we'll be talking about a Mr. John Garcia. Who is he? Guess you'll have to come back and find out...

References

McLeod, S. A. (2007). Skinner - Operant Conditioning. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html

Sea Lion "Spring Training" at Saint Louis Zoo. (2015, March 13). Retrieved April 19, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuytuL_dtzw