Operant conditioning

SKinner interview showing operant conditioning with pigeons. Discusses schedules of reinforcement

• Category

  Film & Animation

[rabbitwho]

Portal's a fine example of a game which gets you to do a task then rewards you by allowing you to do another task. It is Premack's principle that says that any more probable task can be used as reinforcement while it was Harlow who discovered that monkeys would perform tasks such figuring out how to open doors without any reward behind them "just for the fun of it" or for the opportunity of solving another puzzle.

I hope I've taught you something useful! Thanks for reading. Good night :)

[matriks123]

"We believe in free will because we know about our behaviour but not about it's causes"

[cristo3214]

Portal does work in part by offering you a reward with another task, but the game is much more deeper than that and I hope you realised it and only used it a focused example. Because you see, portal's "tasks" are challenging and the simple amazement you have when discovering the solution is much more the reward than another task. It makes you connect with the other human who created the puzzle. Also, Portal has a story. But good comment anyways :)

[pissedoffdude1]

Nah, it's "Skinnerian" conditioning. Operant deals with negative/positive rewards/punishments + rewards. Just google it

[DialecticDr]

So, "aversion" or "aversive stimulus" is a more appropriate Pavlovian term for this consequence called punishment. If a psycho undergoes "punishment" but it only made his behaviour more frequent, then "punishment" never happened. I do not know why Skinner, who avoided layman's terms, used the word punishment, which implies intentional torture (which, in another misleading term, is itself called "positive punishment", and often misunderstood by everyone as "negative reinforcement").

[AwesomenessWeekly]

MMOs reek of this.

[Ldzeppelin729]

Your 2 arguments for free will don't make sense:

1. "he uses his own free will to prove that free will doesn't exist" -in order for me to accept this argument, I have to first assume that free will exists. Your argument assumes the premise you're trying to prove

2. "by acting on his own accord he proves we have a choice"  -see argument above

These aren't proofs for free will. They're circular arguments that assume the idea they're trying to prove...naughty, naughty.

[Ldzeppelin729]

Not sure how free-will can be "hijacked"? Seems like a contradiction in terms. And showing the determinants of behavior (whether it be from a behavior analytic framework, a neural framework, or a cognitive framework) in fact does provide evidence against free will. To show that you can have systematic changes in behavior by manipulated variables A, B, and C, what you are doing is showing that behavior is being caused by A, B, and C...NOT by this magical thing we call "the human will".

[Ldzeppelin729]

"I do not speak of the physiological factors involved in behavior simply because I do not know of them, nor do I have the instruments to do so". -Skinner

(That's probably not the exact quote, but it gets his point across. You can hear it in his own words on one of the other youtube videos of him, though I'm not sure which).

[Ldzeppelin729]

..it be called "punishment". Similarly, only if an event decreases behavior should that be called "aversive". If someone asks, "is shock aversive to rat", the answer is: it depends on whether or not that shock decreases the probability of the behavior that produced it.

[Ldzeppelin729]

Punishment is defined functionally. Punishment is the process by which a behavior decreases in probability (or rate) due to the contingent presentation of some event (in the case of positive punishment, that event is referred to as "aversive", which, like punishment, is defined functionally). Delivering shocks contingent on lever pressing is not always a punishment procedure because it does not always decrease the probability of lever pressing. Only if some consequence decreases behavior should